Radio: Active
by PenguinofProse
Summary: In which Raven Reyes does what she does best, causing the six-year separation between S4 and S5 to take a very different turn.
1. Chapter 1

Raven Reyes was beyond frustrated.

She couldn't fix their lack of rocket fuel. She couldn't fix their lack of literally any food that wasn't algae. She certainly couldn't fix their lack of Clarke, and as a result she couldn't fix their distinct lack of morale. The thing that she most wished she could fix, but was least able to fix, was the fact that Bellamy Blake had literally not left his room for 36 hours and had spent most of those sobbing so loudly that the whole sodding Ring could hear him.

Frustrated didn't even begin to cover it.

With a harsh cry she took a kick at the work bench in front of her. In doing so, she put all of her weight onto her bad leg, overbalanced, went flying a couple of feet forward and took what felt like enough spare wires to light up the Ring like an ironic halo down with her as she crashed to the floor.

She groaned somewhat and wondered whether there was really any point in getting up at all.

She gave herself about ten seconds, then remembered that she was, after all, not a woman made to sit still. And apart from anything else, something pretty bulky was digging into her ribs. Rolling to the side, she realised it was an old radio set that she must have knocked off the table as she fell. With a critical eye she established that it was, in fact, a total piece of junk that should have burnt in Hell when Praimfaiya hit.

What a stroke of good luck. She really hoped her assessment proved correct – a piece of junk to fix up for literally no good reason was exactly what she needed right now.

It might be completely foolish to waste her time on it when she should be figuring out a way to synthesize rocket fuel. It was more than likely completely futile considering the increased radiation that came with the death wave would probably block the signal. And, ultimately, it would probably be more than frustrating when she realised there was no one left alive on Earth to hear her.

But none of that mattered right now. What mattered right now was that Raven Reyes had a piece of junk to fix, and fixing pieces of junk was what she did best.

Sure enough, an hour later she was pretty confident the thing was working. Of course, "working" was a pretty abstract concept when it concerned a communication tool in a world where there was no one to communicate with. Either way, she'd accomplished her goal and could already feel the frustration ebbing out of her system.

She knew that this was the point where she should step away and get on with something useful. There was algae to be stewed, after all. And she should probably write some more random jottings on that whiteboard so that when Emori next popped in to ask how the rocket fuel problem was going she could pretend she was making progress. And, with a sinking feeling in her stomach, she remembered that she'd promised Monty that she'd try to convince Bellamy to come out of his room for just a little while to take a shower and then eat with them.

But, if she were being honest with herself, she felt absolutely no inclination to attempt any of those thankless tasks. She couldn't really see any of them resulting in anything that resembled her definition of success. And besides which, curiosity was a good attribute in a mechanic, she reckoned.

Without giving herself time to overthink it, she pressed the call button and started talking to no one.

If she'd stopped to think about it, Raven might have argued to herself that there _was_ some hope of a message getting through. It was eighteen months since Praimfaiya had first hit so the radiation levels, although still too high for them to survive on the surface, might not completely wipe out the radio signals. Perhaps, if she was very lucky, she'd be able to get through to the bunker.

In reality, she didn't really stop to think about any of those things. She just acted on the instinct that procrastinating with her new project was likely to be far more entertaining than yelling at Bellamy Blake's closed bedroom door.

"This is The Ring, calling Earth, does anyone read me?"

Silence.

She fiddled with the frequency a little and tried again.

"This is The Ring, calling Earth, does anyone read me?"

Another spot of faffing.

"This is The Ring, calling Earth, does anyone read me?"

"Is there... is there anyone down there? Anyone in the bunker? Octavia? …. anyone?"

She choked into silence.

She'd been wrong, she realised. Fixing this radio, only to learn there was no one alive to hear her, _had_ made her day worse after all.

With a heavy sigh, she carefully replaced the headset. Slowly, she stood up and began to make her way towards the door. She needed to get out of here.

"_Raven_?" The radio crackled into life. "Raven? Are you there?"

She froze immediately, hand suspended in midair half way towards the door controls.

Taking a deep breath, she strode back to the radio.

"_Clarke_?"

"Raven! Raven it's me! Oh thank God. You're alive. You're alive."

"Never mind me, _you're_ alive. How on Earth did you manage that one?"

"Becca's bunker, nightblood, and a can-do attitude." Raven could hear the smile in her friend's voice. She laughed in relief.

"Wow. I... wow. That's incredible, Clarke. This... this is real, right? I'm not hallucinating?"

"Totally real, I promise. Either that or we're both hallucinating together."

"You have no idea how great it is to hear your voice."

"Right back at you."

"How are you? How's the ground?"

"I'm fine, actually. I was pretty sick at first but then the nightblood kicked in. And the ground's not bad really, there's this valley that the death wave pretty much missed, so... Enough about me. How are you? How's space?"

"We're good, Clarke. We're all alive. No thanks to Monty's algae!"

"How's... how's Bellamy?"

"He.. um... I think probably you should ask that for yourself. He took it pretty hard, leaving you behind. I'll go get him. Don't go anywhere!"

Raven was pretty sure this was the fastest that she had run since getting shot in the spine. She could feel her brace skidding on the corners as she rushed towards Bellamy's room. She knocked furiously on the door.

There was, unsurprisingly, no response.

"Bellamy, open the door!"

Silence.

"I'm telling you, you're going to want to open this door. I have news you will want to hear."

Nothing.

"Fine, I guess I'll tell you the first good news we've had in literally years through a closed door. Don't say I didn't warn you."

She went for it.

"Clarke survived. She's on the radio. She -"

The door was flung open in her face, and there stood Bellamy Blake, resplendent in a pair of stained grey boxers, a shocked expression and about four days of stubble on his face.

He managed to choke out a somewhat strangled "Really?" and wait for Raven's answering nod before he set off at full pelt down the corridor. She watched him go, laughing from sheer happiness at the sight of his fast-retreating back.

**a/n Thanks for reading! I hope to have the next chapter up soon.**


	2. Chapter 2

Clarke was not sure what she had been expecting from the day, but she was absolutely certain that _this_ was not it.

She was surprised to find nerves mixed with the excitement that was simmering in the pit of her stomach. Now that she was moments away from speaking to the best friend she'd attempted to call on the radio every day for the last eighteen months, she found that she wasn't altogether sure what to say to him. Her standard summary of the day's activities didn't quite seem to cut it, now that there was the possibility of him actually _hearing_ what she had to say. This had all seemed so much simpler when she knew she was really just talking to herself. Should she maybe fetch Madi to tell her the good news? Should she -?

"Clarke?" A familiar voice cut short her rambling train of thought. Just as well, she thought – it hadn't been her most coherent moment. She could hear something approaching desperation in his voice, as well as a certain breathlessness that stood testament to the speed with which he must have run to the radio.

"Yeah, it's me."

"Wow."

"That's what Raven said, actually."

She heard him let out a shaky laugh.

"I'm so sorry, Clarke." She felt her heart deflate in disappointment. Was this what she'd waited eighteen months to hear? What he'd run to say? _Of course_ he was sorry. She knew him well enough by now, she liked to think, to have known that he was sorry long before he said the words. And _of course_ she forgave him. She always would. "I'm so, so sorry. I can't... I'm sorry." He was sobbing weakly, and her heart went out to him. She understood, now, why Raven had insisted that she should speak to him herself, as he trailed off into barely audible repetition of that one, heartbroken word.

She wished she could reach out to give him a hug, but reminded herself to be grateful that they could speak at all.

"Bellamy," she said softly, "It's OK. You did absolutely what I wanted you to do. You lived. And it's all turned out fine. I'm alive, Bellamy. But you know what? If you need forgiveness," she began, putting that hug she so badly wanted to give into her voice, "I'll give that to you. You're forgiven, OK? You're forgiven."

"Thank you, Clarke. I remember, you know. That day, the first time I realised what a great team we could make. That feels like a lifetime ago now." She could hear the smile in his voice, and was beyond grateful to be back on familiar ground.

"So has Monty found a way to grow jobi nuts in space yet?"

She'd missed his laugh, and it was only on hearing it again that she remembered how young and carefree it made him sound.

"No, he's still working on that one. The algae moonshine is pretty good, though. Well, better than any other way of consuming algae, at any rate."

"Ah, I do miss Monty's still."

"Yeah, right. You never truly appreciated that still. You're terrible at fun."

"I promise you," she said, torn between giggles and a need to make him understand that she was serious, that she meant every word, "when we meet again in three and a half years, we are going to have _fun_."

"I'll hold you to that, Princess."

"I'm looking forward to it already."

"It's going to be a long three and a half years."

"Yeah." Privately, she thought the time was going to fly by much quicker now that she could actually expect him to _reply_ when she called. She looked forward to having a conversation rather than a monologue to look forward to at the end of each day. But, somehow, this didn't quite seem like the right time to mention all those calls. She had a feeling that particular confession could lead to conversations they weren't entirely ready to have. Today, she resolved, was a day for celebrations, not difficult conversations.

"I.. I think you probably already worked this out, but, I've missed you. So much." She could hear his voice growing thick with emotion.

"I've missed you too. I think I was onto something when I said we were better together, back in the lab. I don't want to sound clingy, but you had better radio every single day for these next three and a half years. No excuses."

"Don't you worry. I'm not going anywhere."

"How are you, really? How is it up there?"

"It's... safe. I suppose that's something. I've been... struggling to look for the good points, if I'm being honest. I think the others are doing better. Monty and Harper are in their element."

"I'm sorry you're not, though. You'll be back here soon, I promise."

"How is the ground?"

"It's OK, really. I don't know how much Raven told you?"

"Not much. I may slightly have run here before she finished speaking."

She had to laugh at that. "Yes, I thought as much. Well, the nightblood is protecting me pretty well as far as I can tell, and I've made a home in this valley that escaped the worst of the radiation. Some of the deer even have a normal number of heads."

"Wow, you really lucked out."

"Yeah, I did. There's something else, too. I met a child. A girl. Another nightblood. We've sort of teamed up."

"That's great, Clarke. At least you're not completely alone. What's she like?"

"She's called Madi. She's small and fierce and very good at laying bear traps and loves hearing about you guys as her bedtime stories. You should meet her, I can go fetch her. She'd want to speak to you, she's heard so much about you."

"I should probably go get the others at some point too. It's selfish of me to keep you to myself. Do you want to fetch Madi so we can meet her? I promise I'll be back at the call button in two minutes."

"Sure. Try not to run quite so quickly this time. I was worried you might have a cardiac arrest when you first got here."

"Actually, make that three minutes. I just realised I'm still not dressed."

"Wow, Bellamy. Just wow. Thanks for dropping that one in there."

"You're welcome." She could practically _see_ him grinning at that.

"I'll be back again really soon. And, Bellamy?"

"Yes?"

"Please don't disappear on me. Please be there in three minutes. I can't lose you again"

"Same to you. I'm telling you, I will kill you myself if you go missing-presumed-dead on me again."

**a/n Thanks for reading! Next up: Madi meets her heroes.**


	3. Chapter 3

Bellamy didn't think he would ever stop smiling.

As he ran into the dining room that doubled as a kind of common room, he could tell that Raven had already spread the good news – there was a sort of shy curiosity and tentative joy on the faces of his friends before he even started speaking.

"So there's someone on the radio who wants to speak to you all."

He just couldn't stop grinning.

And he knew that he should let the others go first, that he'd just had Clarke's undivided attention for a solid quarter of an hour, that after eighteen months of patience he should be able to manage to wait his turn for a couple of seconds.

But the minute his friends stood up and made to start moving, he bolted for the door and ran back to the radio.

…...

Monty thought he knew what happiness was.

Happiness was floating around in space, safe, far away from a nuclear apocalypse, rejoicing in the love of a good woman. After some tough times on the ground an algae-based diet was a small price to pay for a peaceful existence with Harper, he thought.

But the knowledge that his friend was alive and the corresponding expression of sheer joy on Bellamy's face showed him that he must have been wrong, because really, how could anything else be considered happiness now that he had known this?

With barely restrained eagerness he took Harper by the hand and followed Bellamy down the corridor. Some moments before they arrived at the Earth Monitoring Station, they could already hear him trying to get Clarke's attention.

"Clarke? Are you there? I've got everyone else. And some clean clothes."

Monty wondered what he'd missed at that, but his thoughts were interrupted by Clarke's response.

"I'm back. And Madi's here. Everyone, meet Madi. She's a fierce nightblood I befriended after an incident with a bear trap."

"Hello, friends of Clarke. I'm so pleased she finally got through to you! I've heard so much about you."

Monty had to wonder about the phrase "finally got through to you". He liked to think he was a reasonably intelligent young man – he wasn't an engineer for nothing, after all – and to him that sentence seemed to imply something he hadn't anticipated. It seemed to him that the obvious interpretation of that statement was that Clarke had, in fact, been trying for some time to contact them. That, perhaps, she had put quite a lot of effort into doing so.

Based on the slightly awestruck expression now gracing his face, Bellamy seemed to be following a similar train of thought.

"Got through to us?" He asked, with a certain amount of wonder in his voice.

"Yeah," the child's innocent voice continued, "after all those messages, it's so exciting that you were finally able to reply!"

"Yeah." Bellamy sounded slightly choked. "Of course. Finally."

"Can I speak to Murphy?"

Monty had not been expecting the girl to ask that. Judging by the raised eyebrows in the room, no one else had either. Today was turning out to be a day for the unexpected.

"He's in all my favourite stories. No offense, of course, Bellamy. You seem great too. But you never declared your love for anyone in a crazy scientist lady's lab, so he's still winning."

"What can I say? You're right. Maybe I should have done. Here, I'll hand you over."

"Thank you."

"Erm, hey kiddo."

"Oh my god. Wow. It's really you."

"It is indeed me."

Murphy seemed to be trying very hard to look nonplussed, but there was something of a glow about his ears that rather gave the game away, Monty felt.

"How's space? I've never been to space. Is it really fun? I bet it's really fun."

"You know, I think you could probably have asked Clarke that."

"How's Emori? Are you still saving her from evil scientists? Are you going to have babies? Are you-"

"That will do, Madi." Clarke's voice interrupted the child's flow of increasingly uncomfortable overexcitement. "You will have plenty of opportunities to torture the poor man in due course. You thought surviving everything the Ark and the ground could throw at you was tough, Murphy? You try surviving a seven year old."

"Rather you than me, Clarke. Err... do you want to speak to other people? There are other people here."

Monty held out his hand for the radio.

"Monty's up next, it seems. Bye Clarke. Bye Madi. Be good and I might tell you the story of the time I saved Emori from a shark."

Monty could hear grudging laughter from Echo in the background, as Emori hissed "A shark? Really, John, at least choose something realistic."

There was something Monty had wanted to say to Clarke since the moment they left Earth, but now that he knew that she was alive and he had the opportunity, the words seemed strangely stuck in his throat.

"Thank you, Clarke. For staying. For saving us all."

"You're entirely welcome, Monty. I'd do it again in a heartbeat."

"She's only saying that because she found me." Madi piped up. "She was miserable before that, you know."

"Ignore her," Clarke said, with undisguised affection in her voice, "She has a very high opinion of herself."

Harper appeared at his elbow, took his hand in hers and pressed the call button.

"Thank you from me as well Clarke. I can't... I can't imagine what it's been like down there, on your own for so long too. I have so much respect and gratitude for you."

"Believe me, it's worth it, knowing that you guys are safe and well and happy. We will meet again, I'm telling you."

"Definitely." Harper agreed.

Echo was stepping forward now, and Monty hesitantly offered up the handset, unsure quite what the somewhat fierce former Azgeda warrior could possibly want to say to Clarke.

"I reckon you're pretty bored of being thanked by now," she began "but I won't forget that I was a traitor and your enemy and you had absolutely no reason to save me, but you did it anyway. You taught me something really important that day, Clarke, and I swear to you that I'll never forget it."

To say Monty was shocked would be an understatement. He'd lived with Echo for a year and a half now, and this was the first time she'd dabbled so extensively in introspection. This really was a day for miracles.

"I can't wait to meet you again when this is over, Echo. I hope we can start again. I think we might have more in common than we first realised."

Echo actually smiled at that. "Yeah," she agreed "I think you're right there."

"I suppose it's my turn now." Emori addressed Echo as she stepped forward.

Monty thought privately that this was becoming strangely reminiscent of the sort-of-funereal-memorial-gathering they'd had for Clarke when they'd first got to the Ring. But this didn't seem to be the right time to remind everyone of that difficult day.

"I'm sorry this hasn't been the most interesting conversation, Clarke. I think we all needed to say all these things we wished we'd been able to say sooner. I need you to know how much it meant to me when you injected yourself with that Nightblood instead of me. It made me feel like I could belong somewhere, one day. That you really saw me as a _person_."

"I just can't believe we ever considered doing that. I'm sorry." the shame was evident in Clarke's voice. "I've had a lot of time down here, to think about what I've done. All the things I've done. Every awful moment. And that is one of the mistakes that has stayed with me."

"I hope maybe today could be the day we move on from it?"

"I'd like that. Thank you."

Monty took back the radio. "I hope we can all do better, next time around. When we get back to the ground and get the bunker open, I hope we can all live in peace."

"I hope so too, Monty." He could hear the emotion in Clarke's voice. "I hope so too. Is Raven there? I didn't really get chance to talk to her earlier. Someone interrupted." Bellamy chuckled at that.

"You're not fooling anyone, Griffin. I know you'd have left me to die in a ditch if it meant speaking to Bellamy sooner."

"Yes, I missed you too, Raven." They could all hear the laughter in Clarke's voice.

"Can I ask you something, Raven?" Madi piped up.

"Sure you can, Madi."

"What's it like, being an engineer? Can you teach me, one day? I never really had tech, growing up."

"That sounds like a great plan, kid. First day we're back on Earth, I'm teaching you how to wire a plug. Emori's been learning too, we'll be a great team."

"That sounds cool. I think we have to go to bed now because Clarke promised we could go on an adventure to the berry fields tomorrow and that means we have to get up super early and then walk far."

"Fair enough Madi." Monty could already hear the affection in Raven's voice. He could understand how this girl had wormed her way into Clarke's heart so quickly. "Adventures to berry fields sound important. We'll all talk to you and Clarke again soon, OK?"

"Well of course you will." Madi spoke with the unerring confidence of a child. "You love her. You're not just going to disappear on her now."

"You got that right." Bellamy had stepped forward and taken back control of the radio, as he had clearly been itching to do ever since relinquishing it in the first place. "Do you think you can start getting yourself ready for bed, Madi, so I can speak to Clarke for a minute?"

Murphy sniggered openly at that, at least until Emori shot him a glare. Raven and Monty met each other's eyes with knowing grins. It was Harper who took pity on Bellamy and started ushering the others out of the room.

"They've not spoken in eighteen months, you idiots. Let them say goodnight in peace."

…...

Bellamy's need to know exactly what Madi had meant by that "finally" had been eating away at him since the moment she said it. He simply had to ask before Clarke left for the evening.

More than that, however, he knew he wasn't quite ready to let her disappear again yet, even if it was only until the following day this time.

He waited until he thought the others were out of earshot, took a deep breath, and broached the topic.

"_Finally_ got through, huh?"

"Uhuh"

"After how many attempts?"

There was the slightest hesitation, then -

"Five hundred and forty six"

This was, Bellamy thought, more joy and security and peace and hope than any man had the right to feel in the aftermath of a nuclear apocalypse.

**a/n Thanks for reading! Now that everyone's finished feeling grateful/guilty I hope things will start to get interesting.**


	4. Chapter 4

Murphy wasn't interested in admitting to anyone that he had slept well that night. It wasn't like he and Clarke had ever been close or anything. Really he had no right to care at all about her unexpectedly ongoing existence.

But meeting Emori had brought out some unexpected facets of his personality, and he found that he had not liked watching his friends grieve. In particular he had not liked watching Bellamy fall apart.

If he were being truly honest with himself, he had not liked living at the cost of someone else's life _again_.

So at the breakfast table the following morning he tried his very hardest to play listlessly with his algae porridge as usual. This was rendered slightly tricky by the fact that there were a few key pointers to the existence of good news. Bellamy had actually shown up to breakfast, for one. And everyone seemed to be smiling, which was not a common occurrence so early in the morning in a metal box in the sky.

The weirdest thing of all, was that people were actually eating their porridge, and not one person seemed inclined to go through the daily ritual of pointing out that this was exactly the same gloop that was served up as "soup" at lunch and "stew" at dinner.

Maybe Murphy really could start to believe in miracles.

He was caught by surprise at Bellamy's invitation to do a little combat training with him after breakfast. He couldn't remember the last time he had _invited_ anyone to do anything.

He allowed himself a small and genuine smile as he agreed, and followed his crewmate from the room.

…...

Bellamy needed to keep himself busy. He knew that, if he didn't, he would spend the entire day sitting next to the radio waiting for Clarke and Madi to get home. And he was painfully aware that he had been anything but sociable recently, so a morning of training with Murphy sounded like just the thing.

Of course, he had underestimated Murphy's aptitude for taking the piss.

"So, _maybe you should have done, _huh?"

Bellamy wanted very badly to pretend that he had no idea what Murphy was talking about. But, unfortunately, he knew he wouldn't fool anyone. Every one of his crewmates had been there to hear him imply that, maybe, he should have once declared his love for someone in, as Madi had so insightfully put it, "a crazy scientist lady's lab". And every one of them was perceptive enough to know who he'd been thinking about as he said that. It wasn't exactly rocket science. And really, what did it matter? All that mattered was that she was _alive_. With that thought, he looked Murphy straight in the eye, said "Yes, maybe I should have done", and aimed his right fist at his friend's stomach.

…...

Bellamy made it to about mid afternoon before he cracked and headed back to the Earth monitoring station. It didn't matter that she wouldn't be back yet, he reasoned. He could sit and wait – he had nothing else to do anyway. And he'd found a book, so he could read. That wasn't a completely foolish use of time, when he put it like that. He'd already "helped" Monty with the algae farm until he'd been told to leave with an instruction to go away and come back when he was feeling patient. That seemed a bit unreasonable, he thought – surely no one was expecting him to be _patient_ today.

He opened his book (a worn copy of the _Aeneid_ that he'd found hiding behind a cabinet in an

old school room) and set about waiting.

He struggled on for about fifteen minutes, before coming to the conclusion that the _Aeneid_ wasn't such a great book after all. Funny, he seemed to remember it had held his interest much better when he'd read it previously. Maybe Homer really was the better author. Somehow, this particular book just wasn't quite what he fancied today.

So much for reading then.

And really, that left only one logical thing to do. After all, he didn't actually know how far away these berry fields were. Maybe they'd already be back by now. It surely couldn't hurt to check, could it?

He pressed the call button and began. "Hi Clarke, just wondering if you're back yet. And Madi, too, of course. I hope you had a nice trip. Or are still having a nice trip, I suppose. Anyway, I wasn't sure what time you'd be back so I just thought I'd check if you were around. Of course, if you're not around I'll try again later. Like we originally planned, I suppose. Erm, yes, I'll stop rambling now."

"I would, if I were you." The response came right away, and he could hear the laughter in her voice.

"Wow. I am not proud that you heard that."

"Another five hundred and forty five attempts like that and maybe I'll consider us even. Care to explain why you're calling a solid four hours earlier than agreed even though you didn't expect me to be home?"

"Care to explain how you managed to reply immediately?"

"Touche. Moving on..."

"So how were the berry fields?"

"Great, actually. I really love going on adventures with Madi. I was on my own for the first year so it's pretty great to have some company."

"Yeah. I'm pleased you found her."

"Me too. And there's not exactly a lot of entertainment options here so a day out is a pretty good thing."

"I can understand that. What was the most exciting thing about your adventure today?"

"Madi found a dead mole and threw it at me. That was pretty wild."

"Wow"

"How is your day going?"

"Pretty good. Trained with Murphy for a while. Annoyed Monty for a while. I was trying to help but he just didn't see it."

"Poor bloke. He must have his work cut out looking after you lot."

"Yeah, he's been a bit of a hero."

"I'm sorry to cut this short, but I actually still have to go catch dinner. Any chance of rescheduling this, for, you know, the time we actually said we'd speak?" Bellamy felt his cheeks heat up as she spoke. Of course, it was selfish of him to think that she had nothing better to do than sit around speaking to him all day.

"I'm sorry. I didn't even think about how busy you must be. Of course, we can speak later. I'm sorry."

"Hey, no need to apologise. It was great to speak to you. I seem to remember I enjoy it enough to have tried to get through once or twice before." He relaxed at that, and felt a smile grow on his face.

"You know what, now that I know you weren't killed by some terrifying mutant creature on your day out, I think I can allow you to go get some supper. You'd better call back as soon as you're done though."

"Don't you worry. I'll be here."

**a/n Thanks for reading!**


	5. Chapter 5

"Bellamy? I'm back now. We had supper. But I guess you might still be having supper, it's still a little early. Anyway, I'm here." Clarke stopped herself there, painfully aware that she was, in fact, in danger of -

"Rambling yourself, now, are you Princess?" Bellamy's voice was only a little mocking, she hoped.

"I do not ramble!" She made a show of her indignation, enjoying the chance to exchange jibes like this after so long without his company.

"I know what I heard."

"Whatever." She'd let him win this one. "How was your supper?"

"The food or the company?"

"Either. Both. I want to know everything that's going on with you guys." She missed them, their company, their ability to find humour in even the darkest of times, so much that it hurt.

"OK. The food was gross. It always is. It was a lot more digestible today, everyone was so happy that you are OK that it seemed more palatable."

"Wow. I'm going to go ahead and say that's a compliment."

"It definitely is. It's basically the highest compliment I'm capable of giving. You, Clarke Griffin, have the power to render algae non-repulsive." She glowed at that. She knew he was messing about, but could feel that there was a good measure of meaningful truth wrapped up in his declaration as well.

"And you, Bellamy Blake, really know how to compliment a woman."

"Yeah, maybe I should keep practising." Her heart did a funny little hiccup at that, but she fought to keep her tone light.

"I wouldn't object. I figure you can only improve."

"Rude. Anyway, you still owe me a full account of your day."

"OK. I woke up this morning. Ate some dried apple, because we have real food here on the ground. Trod on a slug on the way to the latrine, then spent ten minutes cleaning slug guts off the bottom of my foot. Is this the kind of detail you wanted?"

"I actually hate slugs. Please don't. Really. Tell me about Madi instead?" She could hear that he was, in fact, grossed out. Bellamy Blake, freaked out by slugs – she saved that useful nugget of information, tucked it up her sleeve in case it should prove useful in the future.

"Madi is your typical seven-year-old, I suppose, but as I haven't known many seven-year-olds before now I think I'm hardly qualified to judge. She loves expeditions to the berry fields, because it means we spend the whole day together, talking, and we take a little picnic, so it's a nice change from staying home doing chores and her lessons. I'm trying to teach her to read and write and add up and things. I feel woefully inadequate and wish you were here, because this is something I know you'd be better at than I am." She sighed deeply. She had needed to get that off her chest. Raising a child was a scary business.

"Clarke, breathe. You're doing great. I've only spoken to her once but it's obvious she adores you."

"Thank you. I just always think that you'd know what to do."

"Because of O?"

"Yeah."

"Do you... do you know if she's OK?" She had known it was only a matter of time until he asked.

"I think so. I'm sorry, I know that's a terrible answer. I went to the bunker, thinking maybe I could join them, back before I found Madi. But Polis is such a mess, Bellamy. The tower has collapsed over the door of the bunker. There's no way one person could dig it out. I should know – I tried. But it's survived one apocalypse, remember. I'm sure it will survive again. I'm sorry I can't tell you anything else." She was crying openly now, and she knew that it wasn't helpful, that it was her turn to be strong for him, but somehow she couldn't quite manage it.

"Hey, don't apologise." She could hear that his voice was thick with tears too. "You did all you could, I'm sure. Thank you for trying."

"We'll get them out, when you get back." She needed him to believe her.

"Yeah, of course." His sentence ended on what sounded suspiciously like a sob. "I'm going to turn in, I think." Another strangled sob. "Busy day and all. Night night." She sat, surprised, for a moment. Sure, he was upset, but why was he running away? Did he not want her to hear him cry? Had he only wanted to speak to her to ask about his sister?

By the time she had gathered her wits and replied, with a slightly panicked "Bellamy, are you still there?" it was apparent that he was long gone.

…...

For the first hour, Bellamy didn't really think at all. He simply ran away from the Earth monitoring station, locked his bedroom door, and collapsed in a crumpled heap of grief. He was faintly aware that he could hear what sounded like a wounded animal, but never quite got as far as realising that he was the one making the noise.

For the next couple of hours, he wondered what he had been thinking. It wasn't like Clarke would have replied with a "Yes, she's fine, want to speak to her?". If she'd seen or heard from Octavia, she'd have mentioned it already. It would have been cruel not to. And it made a lot of sense, really, that she wouldn't have been able to open the bunker alone. Of course Polis would have been severely damaged. That was to be expected.

By that night, when the others were long in bed, he was thinking about how Clarke must feel now. She was probably feeling awful, he figured. She was probably blaming herself for not managing to dig them out, or for upsetting him with the words she'd used or the way she'd told him. And he'd basically run away without explaining himself, and abandoned her yet again, when he'd promised her only the day before that he would never do that again. She was, most likely, worried sick.

By the early hours of the morning, he thought that this was the biggest mistake he'd made in quite some time. The logical part of his mind protested that he couldn't have controlled his reaction, couldn't have moderated his grief, but logic had flown out of the window several hours ago.

He had been beyond overjoyed to find out that Clarke was alive. He wanted to focus on that joy, not his worry for his sister. When he spoke to Clarke tomorrow, he would make sure that she knew that.

For tonight, sleep was destined to be a long time coming.

…...

Raven was an habitually early riser, and this morning she intended to make the most of it. There was something joyful about the atmosphere on the Ring since they'd got back in touch with Clarke, and the newfound lightness in the air had her more optimistic than she'd been in weeks. Last night, they had even spent the evening together after supper, where they'd all sat round the dinner table and played cards. Well, not all of them, she remembered with a smirk. Bellamy hadn't taken part, but they'd all shared knowing winks at that and presumed that he was otherwise occupied for the entire evening by a radio date with a certain someone on the ground.

Now that they knew Clarke was alive and there was a nice patch of ground they'd be able to survive on in three and a half years, Raven's motivation to tackle the fuel problem had been reinvigorated, to say the least. On arriving at the Earth monitoring station, she picked up a board marker and set to work. Some of the notes she had written to keep Emori fooled did have a little merit, she conceded after a few minutes. Even Raven Reyes at her worst was still a better engineer than most could hope to be at their best.

She wasn't surprised when Emori appeared in the doorway some minutes later. The two of them had grown closer in recent months and become fast friends. Her inner cynic reckoned it was through lack of options and forced proximity, but if she were truly honest with herself she understood that she had been lucky to get to know Emori. She was a very bright young woman with a fierce sense of humour – it was almost like they had a lot in common, or something.

"Well that's more progress than you've made in months. Maybe now you'll finally stop procrastinating and find us a way to the ground." Raven was taken by surprise by the realisation that Emori had not been fooled after all.

"You... knew?"

"Knew that you were writing random crap to disguise the fact you had nothing? Yep. Not an idiot."

"I never thought you were. I just... Don't like failing, I guess."

"That's why I didn't let on that I knew." Raven needed to stop underestimating her friend, both when it came to intelligence and to wisdom.

"Well, thanks, then."

"You're welcome. So, looks like we'll be there in three and a half years?"

"Well, we need to be, don't we? Now that we know Clarke is waiting for us, failure's not an option." Emori nodded in acknowledgment at that, and walked towards the board. Carefully, methodically, she read each line of notes and took in the little progress Raven had made.

"So, Raven, your arithmetic is sound. No surprises there. But I think we'll have to think outside the box a bit more than this."

"I'm listening. What have you got in mind?"

"Well, I'm thinking -" She broke off as the radio crackled to life, and the question that Clarke asked left them staring at each other in confusion.

"Hi, guys? Clarke here. Is... is Bellamy OK?"

**a/n** **Thanks for reading! It seems likely that there might be a certain amount of fluff in the next chapter...**


	6. Chapter 6

"What do you mean? Why wouldn't he be OK?" Raven was beyond confused.

"He... Seemed a bit upset last night." She got the feeling there was something that Clarke wasn't telling them.

"Well none of us have seen him, he was up late talking to you, wasn't he?" That had to be the answer, logically speaking. And Raven was nothing if not logical.

"Not as such, no."

"What do you mean by that?"

There was a beat of silence, as if Clarke was wondering how to phrase her next sentence.

"I think he decided to go to bed early."

"You _think_?"

"Well, I don't really know. We were talking and then he got upset and then he was gone." Raven could hear the tension in her friend's voice and privately wondered what could have gone so wrong – Bellamy seemed overjoyed when they last spoke at supper yesterday evening.

"OK, Clarke. Don't panic. He can't have gone anywhere, we're on a space station after all. I'll go and find out what's going on. Chat to Emori for a bit."

"Thanks, Raven. I just... Tell him I'm sorry." That, thought Raven, was an interesting development. Head swimming with more questions than answers, she went in search of Bellamy.

…...

Bellamy didn't particularly think he had slept, but he was certainly waking up now so he must have dozed off at some point. He could hear someone knocking on the door, and what sounded like Raven's voice. He sighed deeply and buried his face in the pillow. He didn't really want to deal with _himself_ this morning, let alone anyone else. He needed to get to that radio and make things right with Clarke, but she was probably busy living her life and looking after Madi, not sitting around waiting for him to realise he was an idiot. Gradually, some of Raven's shouting managed to penetrate the fog of his self-recrimination. She seemed to be yelling something about...

"Clarke wants to speak to you, Bellamy. She's really worried and I don't know why." Raven's voice sounded frantic, and she was still hammering on the door. He bolted towards it and threw it open, to her visible shock.

"She does? She's there now?"

"Yes, Bellamy, she's there now, worried sick about you. She says she's sorry, but I don't know what for. Are you OK?"

"Yeah, I'm OK. She has nothing to be sorry for."

"In that case, Bellamy Blake, what the hell is wrong with you?" He had to admit he was a little surprised by Raven's sudden change of tone. "She sounds absolutely frantic. Said something about you disappearing on her last night. How could you do that to her? She's been down there, _alone, _but for the recent company of a small child, for _eighteen months_, and her closest friend disappears on her the day after she manages to get in touch with him again? Did you even think about what that would do to her?" He deserved to hear this, he reflected, but that didn't stop it from being enormously unpleasant to do so.

"I know, Raven. You can stop now. Believe me, I've already thought of everything you could possibly have to say on the subject. Now, if you'll excuse me, I have to go speak to Clarke."

…...

Clarke hadn't slept much – or at all, if she was being honest with herself - and as soon as it was a vaguely socially acceptable time to do so, she had reached for the radio on the off-chance that anyone was awake on the Ark. She was beyond relieved to hear Raven's voice, but now, as she had gone in search of Bellamy and left her with the instruction to talk to Emori, she could feel the rising bubble of confusion and worry in her chest threatening to burst all over again.

"Do you want to talk about it?" Emori's voice came over the radio.

"No, thank you." She barely knew the woman, and didn't particularly think she was one for deep and meaningful conversations about feelings in any case.

"OK." They both seemed inclined to let the silence settle for a minute. Clarke, however, discovered that the bubble in her chest caused her more problems when she was left to her own thoughts, so she cast about for something to say.

"How are things with Murphy?" She cursed herself silently, because in asking that question she felt that she had admitted that she knew nothing at all about Emori besides her relationship status.

"John is John." She replied with a laugh in her voice. "He loves me, and I love him, but sometimes we show it in unconventional ways."

"Uhuh." She couldn't really be less interested in the ways that John Murphy showed his love, but she didn't have another topic of conversation to hand.

"He's not like Bellamy, who wears his heart on his sleeve all the time."

"If Bellamy's that easy to read perhaps you could explain to me why the hell he ran off last night." Clarke felt a disproportionate level of misplaced anger at Emori rising in her at that woman's flippant words.

"Yes, I don't think that's very difficult to explain." Emori sounded completely calm and confident. "I imagine he got really upset or worried about something – probably something to do with either you or his sister to get that level of response – and then his emotions got the better of him. He's probably furious with himself right now, because he was _so_ happy to hear from you, to know you're alive, and now he's made you upset and worried too."

"You... you think so?" Clarke hated the vulnerability in her voice but seemed powerless to stop her words from running away with her as her anxieties spilled over. "You don't think he's angry with me? Because I could have tried harder to get to Octavia. I could have kept digging for longer."

"I don't know what was said between the two of you last night. But I do know that if there were _any way_ you could have got through to his sister, you would have done. And he knows that too. So stop blaming yourself for everything, all of the time, and get on with speaking to him. I can hear him in the corridor now."

"Thanks Emori. Really. I think we should get to know each other better in the next three and a half years."

"Agreed."

…...

Bellamy walked to the radio, nervous, heart galloping. He told himself to pull it together – this was only Clarke, and they had had difficult conversations before, and survived.

"Clarke?" He could hear the slight tremor in his voice.

"Bellamy." Did she sound angry? Worried? It was difficult to tell from one word.

"I don't know where to start. I'm sorry I ran off last night. I didn't mean to make you worry." He hoped she could hear how genuine he was, how much he meant it.

"It's OK. I know how much you care about your sister." She sounded calm, and compassionate, and in control, and so thoroughly _Clarke_ that it made his chest hurt.

"But I need you to know how much I care about you, too, Clarke. I need you to know that the day before yesterday, when I found out you were still alive, was the best day of my life. And I need you to know that I will never, ever, abandon you again."

"It's OK, I get it. Really, I do. Emotions have been running pretty high recently. Well, since we came to Earth really. What do you think it would have been like, if the Ark had never failed? If we met up there, in another life?" It was something she had often allowed herself to wonder, recently, as she drifted off to sleep alone in the wake of a nuclear apocalypse.

"I think I'd have thought that you were a stuck up princess at first, and then I'd have noticed that you were clever and brave, and then I'd have realised that we complemented each other like two pieces of the same puzzle. So pretty much how it happened on Earth, really." She heard the pure affection in his reply, and knew then that they would never need to discuss what happened last night, because they were Clarke and Bellamy, and they didn't need words to understand each other perfectly.

**a/n Thanks for reading!**


	7. Chapter 7

**a/n I'm sorry it's been a while - I shall try to be less distracted by other plot bunnies in future. Enjoy!**

Murphy was sadly unsurprised to find Emori long gone by the time he woke up. This had been normal for some time now. He wasn't sure when the balance had tipped to his disfavour, to her spending more time with Raven than with him, but it had happened so gradually that she was spending almost all her waking hours with the engineer before he had realised quite what was happening. Of course, she was still sleeping with him, and for the old Murphy, the one who'd first landed on Earth a little over two years ago, that would have been enough. And they were still using the L-word plenty, but he was beginning to fear it was out of habit rather than honesty – or, at least, it might be that way before long.

But then Clarke had got through to them and everyone was so damn happy and Bellamy's permanently awestruck expression was starting to make him feel like, maybe, minor problems like his girlfriend having a new best friend were not so insurmountable after all. And Madi wanted to talk to him because he'd once declared his love for Emori in the middle of Becca's lab, and that reminded him that actually, they were a little bit essential to each other after all.

And so he found himself wondering, in a most un-John-Murphy-like way, if perhaps he needed to practise romance a little bit. Maybe, he mused, it was time to take Emori on a date. He was a little apprehensive at the thought, because he didn't want her to think he was clingy or sappy or in any way not the insufferable cockroach she had first fallen in love with, but he figured it was worth a try. He was beginning to fear that, if he did nothing, she might just slip away from him anyway.

He was expecting to have the leisure to continue this train of thought over breakfast – no doubt Monty and Harper would be wrapped up in their own little world, and Emori and Raven would be discussing something he couldn't even hope to understand, and Echo wasn't much of a conversationalist at the best of times. He was used to spending the majority of the day in his own company, so it had been fun to spar with Bellamy yesterday. Maybe, he thought, he could try that again. There was no rule that being a generally insufferable human meant he couldn't at least try having friends.

He was taken by surprise, therefore, by the sound of someone calling his name as he walked into the room where they usually ate. He looked up, and there were Raven and Emori, and they even looked at least a little happy to see him.

"Morning." He offered. "What are you doing here?"

"Bellamy's on the radio." Raven explained. "We thought they might appreciate a little privacy."

"I don't know." He smirked a little. "I think it might be quite funny to eavesdrop on them working so hard at _not_ being in love."

"Don't, John." Why was Emori snapping at him? What had he said wrong? "They've had a row of some sort. Could you try not being ridiculously insensitive for once in your life?"

Well, so much for his plan to romance her.

"Oh." He knew he was probably supposed to say something sarcastic, but he wasn't sure he could. Because he didn't like thinking that Emori had a low opinion of him, and if he was being honest, he didn't like the idea of Bellamy being upset. That man was one of the closest things he'd ever had to a friend, after all.

"So, Raven, back to the fuel, what are your thoughts?" Great, he thought. This was the moment where they were going to start a conversation from which he was thoroughly excluded.

"I just don't know. I mean, we have no hydrazine, obviously. But I don't think we have anything else that would be a viable substitute. A couple of centuries ago, the big space travel organisations used to use hydrogen and oxygen. Sure, we've got oxygen, but not to spare, and we simply don't have the power supply to produce hydrogen by electrolysis on the scale we'd need. We have literally nothing." He was sick of this. Sick of the long words Raven was using, sick of the long silences between him and Emori.

"We've got plenty of algae." He let the undisguised anger show through in his voice. "Now, if you'll excuse me, I'm going to go in search of what passes for breakfast round here."

"John!" That was Emori again, no doubt telling him that he'd offended her in some other way. "That's brilliant. You're a genius, John. We've got plenty of algae!"

"Yes, Emori. We have plenty of algae. How, exactly, could you please explain, does that make Murphy a genius?" Raven was clearly as confused as he was. At least, for a moment, he didn't need to be the chief idiot in the room.

"You remember that study you recommended I read? About a month ago? Biofuel!"

"Wow. That's absolutely crazy, of course, I mean, the rocket is designed for hydrazine for starters, but I suppose we've got three and a half years to work out how to convert it. And we'd need a _huge_ amount of fuel. But Monty would probably love for us to tell him he can make more algae." Even he laughed at that, finding the increasingly buoyant mood in the room infectious. "I'll go suggest it to him now. This could be so good!" She grabbed him into a fierce hug and then ran from the room, as fast as her leg brace allowed her to. He scowled at that thought, and wondered if he would ever forgive himself for firing that shot.

He took a deep breath and walked towards Emori. Maybe, if he was such a genius, she might be up for allowing herself to be romanced after all? Slowly, carefully, he took Raven's recently vacated seat.

"Hey." He began, because he had to begin somewhere. She looked up and met his eyes, and he found himself wondering how to introduce the subject. "So I was thinking that, you know, with you and Raven hanging out we've not seen each other much recently." Ah. That was not how he had meant to start, and she did not look happy. "Not that that's a bad thing, of course! It's great that you two have hit it off and... I'm proud of you, really I am, for being so great at all these... clever mechanic things."

"You are?" She sounded strangely shy.

"Of course I am." She looked surprised by the vehemence in his voice, and he decided that this was a good moment to risk reaching out to take her hand. "Anyway, so I was wondering, do you want to spend some time together, just the two of us? Maybe watch a film or eat our evening algae next to that big window with the nice view of Earth? I mean, I get that you're busy with Raven, obviously we can fit it around your plans. I just thought it might be... nice?" He could feel himself trailing off awkwardly, and fixed his gaze on the floor. He should have realised that asking beautiful women out on dates was not a John Murphy thing to do.

Having talked himself into this negative frame of mind, he was rather surprised to find that Emori was flinging her arms around his neck.

"Yes." She whispered, somewhere near his ear. "I'd like that. Today?"

…...

Monty had responded with cautious optimism to the idea of fueling the rocket on algae, and Raven took that as validation of her improbably perky mood. They were going to find a way to get back to Earth, and judging by the atmosphere as she'd left them only moments ago, Emori and Murphy were going find a way to actually _speak_ to each other, rather than just sleeping together. Bolstered by all this optimism doing the rounds, she made the mistake of agreeing to be the one who went to fetch Bellamy for breakfast. Everyone else had made it to the table, and was sitting waiting for the doling out of the porridge, when Emori tentatively suggested that they should probably check whether he and Clarke had managed to sort things out and maybe get him to eat his algae.

She was half way out of the door before she cursed herself and decided she would send Harper next time. Why was it always her who had to be on Bellamy-sitting duties? She'd hoped looking after him would get easier since they heard from Clarke, but at this rate, he was going to be even more devastated if the pair of them kept arguing all the time. With a heavy sigh, she opened the door to the Earth Monitoring Station. She had been braced for awkwardness so robust she needed a hacksaw to cut through it, but was met instead with Bellamy's booming laugh. Utterly bemused, she got on with her task.

"I hate to interrupt, but we're waiting on you for breakfast." His face fell at that, as if the idea of leaving this only link to Clarke for so much as the five minutes it took to get a bowl of algae down him was unbearable.

"Clarke, I'm sorry, Raven's telling me I have to go. She wants me to remember to eat or something."

"How dare she take such good care of you." She could hear the undisguised joy in her friend's voice. "Go on, I should let you get on with your day. I'll be here tonight, I promise."

"Yeah, I'll speak to you then." She watched him take a deep breath, as if unsure whether to say what was about to come out of his mouth. "And remember that I... care about you a lot, yes?" She wasn't sure whether to well up at that, or to snigger into her sleeve at how completely emotionally inarticulate these two wonderful people were with each other.

"Only if you remember that I feel the same way about you. Take care, speak later."

"Yeah, speak to you this evening." With that, Bellamy sighed deeply and put down the handset.

"It's OK." Raven murmured, walking over to him. "She knows. And you heard her say it herself, she feels exactly the same. And she'll be there tonight, and the next night, and the next. You're not going to lose her again. And in three and a bit years you'll be able to tell her in person."

**a/n Thanks for reading!**


	8. Chapter 8

**a/n Thank you for showing this story so much love through your reading and reviewing and following and favouriting. Enjoy this chapter!**

"I will?" Bellamy stifled the joy that was threatening to overwhelm him at the utter certainty in Raven's tone. "Did you find a solution to the fuel problem?"

"Yeah. Well, we think so. And mostly, if Monty and Emori and I _think_ we've fixed something, we have. So yeah, we'll be there in three and half years." He engulfed Raven in a hug.

"That's brilliant, Raven. Great. I should radio Clarke to tell her the good news!" He was reaching for the handset but Raven beat him to it.

"Bellamy. You should have breakfast. Everyone's waiting for you. And then you should do something useful with your day, like keep fit or do some chores. And then, this evening, you can call Clarke and tell her the good news." He tried to arrange his features into an apologetic sort of a shape, but he thought he probably looked too absurdly joyful for it to be effective.

"OK, OK. Let's get some breakfast."

…...

Emori liked to think that, by now, she knew John Murphy pretty damn well, so she wasn't expecting him to surprise her three times in one day. The accidentally genius revelation about the fuel was one thing. The invitation to what she could only think of as, well, a _date_, was quite another, and she didn't really expect him to top that.

But then he did.

Raven and Bellamy walked into breakfast, and Bellamy didn't _look_ like his world was ending, but really, with Bellamy, you could never be too sure. And she wondered whether perhaps she should say something cheerful, and she thought that probably if anyone was going to ask whether the argument had been resolved it should be Monty, because it seemed like a Monty-ish thing to do. Of course, by now, she and Raven had informed everyone of the situation – not out of a desire to gossip, of course, but because they had all united in feeling a little _protective_ of Bellamy over the last eighteen months, and it was best that they were all on the same page. She caught Harper's eye and cocked her brow, as if to ask who was going to dive into this can of worms first.

And then John pulled the rug out from under everyone's feet.

"How's things, mate? Clarke OK?" The way he said it, with that upbeat lilt to his voice and a typically _John_ air of carelessness was absolutely perfectly judged. It was, she thought, as if he was just asking his newfound sparring buddy an off-hand question about how his morning was going, with no hidden agenda whatsoever. She didn't think even Raven could have done better in the field of studied nonchalance, had she been sitting here all along pretending not to be desperately waiting for him to return with news.

She found herself falling in love all over again. For the third time that morning.

"Yeah, she's good. She's really good." A smile lit his face and the table breathed a collective and not altogether discreet sigh of relief.

"Cool, cool. Hey, do you want to train together again after breakfast? That was pretty fun." She felt her heart swelling with pride, and spontaneously reached out for his hand under the table. At first, she thought, he twitched away from her as if surprised – it had been a while, she mused, since they had last engaged in a spontaneous display of affection – but he then entwined his fingers in hers.

"You found getting your ass kicked fun?" John narrowed his eyes good-humouredly at the false innocence in Bellamy's tone.

"It's on, Blake. It is so on."

…...

He should have known that Murphy wouldn't be afraid to fight dirty, he mused, from his position on the floor, pinned underneath the smaller man. But he had been winning so decisively that he thought he could afford to engage in a little chat. He didn't see how that could be dangerous. Clearly, he had underestimated his opponent, and now he found himself completely at a loss as to what to do – both in terms of extricating himself from this losing position, and rectifying the immensely awkward conversational corner he was currently backed into.

Really, how on Earth was one to go about answering the question _have you two had radio sex yet then?_

"What's radio sex?" OK, clearly not like _that_, Blake, he cursed himself.

"You know, radio sex. Like how couples in old Earth literature and movies have phone sex when they're physically far apart."

"I don't know what kind of old Earth literature you've been reading, but that does _not_ sound like the Odyssey."

"Well, duh. They didn't have phones then."

"But, I mean, how – even – what would you - ?"

"I'll take that as a no, then"

"Not that it's any of your damn business anyway."

"Well of course it's none of my business." Murphy smirked. "But that doesn't mean I'm going to pass up a perfectly good opportunity to take the piss."

"You absolute cockroach." At least this thoroughly mortifying conversation had temporarily distracted him from the fact he was, in fact, still pinned to the floor.

"I wonder if Clarke would be more loquacious on the subject?" He fumed at that, because Clarke did not deserve Murphy being... Murphy at her, but also because he was, he found, profoundly uncomfortable at the idea of Clarke discussing with Murphy the possibility of the two of them having _radio_ _sex._

"I swear, Murphy, if you go torment her with this topic I will end you. In a non-criminal way, of course."

Murphy laughed at that, entertained by Bellamy using his own former words against him, and he took advantage of the distraction as an opportunity to get on with winning.

…...

"Madi, put that down! It is a spanner, not a toy." Clarke couldn't help feeling, at times like this, that she was not a natural at this whole parenting thing.

"It's a toy if I'm playing with it." Sometimes, she thought, she saw a little too much of Raven in the girl – both in the sass and in the fact she _wanted_ to play with a spanner. The two of them hadn't even met, yet, not really. She hated to think how they would gang up on her when they were all reunited.

"Madi, honey. Give me the spanner. If you give me the spanner, you can come with me to the stream to catch supper."

"I'm seven, Clarke, not _three_. I know when you're tricking me. You would let me come with you anyway."

"That I would. Come on, _yongon_. Let's go fishing."

Fish were caught, as they usually were, since Madi had taught her how to fish with some degree of competence, and she admired the restraint the child showed in not pushing her into the river when her back was turned in revenge for the spanner confiscation. The summer evening was warm, so they baked the fish by the fire and charred some corn from their vegetable garden and made a bit of a feast of it out in the fresh air.

"You all done? Full?" She ruffled the girl's hair affectionately with one hand as she took her plate with the other and led her back into their home.

"Can we go talk to your friends now?"

"Just a minute, we have to clean up first, remember?" She threw a worn tea towel in the child's general direction and set about washing the dishes, but was immediately and completely undermined by Bellamy's voice issuing from the radio in the corner of the room.

"This is the Ring, calling Clarkadia, does anyone read me?"

Madi didn't even pretend to wait for permission before abandoning her tea towel and running for the handset.

"Bellamy! It's me! Madi, that is. It's Madi."

"Thanks Madi. I pretty much worked out it was you seeing as it wasn't Clarke." She stifled a laugh and got on with folding the tea towel the child had jettisoned.

"Oh."

"How was your day, Madi?"

"It was so good! Clarke was teaching me about plants that are good for healing so we went on a walk in the woods and she showed me some really cool things. You know there's this red seaweed that can kill germs? It's so cool." Clarke felt something of a warm glow at the knowledge that Madi actually _enjoyed_ her lessons and the time they spent together.

"Yeah, me and that seaweed? We go way back."

"How was your day, Bellamy? What's it like in space? How's Murphy?"

"He's OK, I think, but I did beat him when we were training together this morning so I think he's feeling a bit sorry for himself. I'm sure he'd have liked to speak to you," Clarke privately suspected that was stretching the truth somewhat, "but he's taken Emori out for the evening."

"How do you take someone out in space? Have they gone on a spacewalk like Raven does?"

"Not quite, I'm afraid. I think they've just gone to watch a film together in one of the spare rooms."

"That sounds so romantic." Clarke could hear the sigh in the seven-year-old's voice and realised that this new tidbit of information had only enhanced the legend that was John Murphy in the child's mind. Dishes now washed, she leaned against the sink and watched, entranced, as Madi practically glowed with the excitement of talking to one of her heroes about another.

"Yeah, he's a master of romance, that man. Definitely." Clarke giggled at the sarcasm in Bellamy's voice. "Is Clarke there?"

"Yeah, she's pretending to do chores but I'm pretty sure she's just listening to your voice. I'll go play now, your conversations are normally boring." With that, Madi hopped off her chair and gave Clarke a cheerful wave as she ran towards the bedroom.

"Listening to my voice?" His tone was playful, and sort of made her want to swat him in the ribs, but of course, he wasn't really there.

"Whatever. I have objections."

"Yes?"

"Many objections."

"I look forward to them all. Enormously."

"Objection one: Clarkadia is stupid. I refuse to allow you to call this Clarkadia."

"Overruled. I shall call your home whatever I want. Carry on."

"Objection two: you undermined my attempts at parenting. I was literally in the process of telling her that she had to do chores before she could call you when you called us. Undermining in the extreme."

"I just really wanted to talk to you. You can't hate me for that." Damn, it was difficult to be annoyed – or even mock-annoyed – with him when he was sweet.

"Objection number three is sort of a compound objection. The whole Murphy, master of romance thing. The first part of the objection is that I believe it's cruel to use sarcasm on a child too young to understand it, and therefore the second part of the objection is that it's misleading to let her believe that this man she idolises for some strange reason is actually capable of romance."

"I think I might actually win on this one – he has actually taken Emori out on a date. It's adorable. She looked so smitten."

"Who knew? Maybe he is actually capable of personal growth and maturity and things."

"I wouldn't go that far, Princess. I mean, he did ask me... No, actually. Forget I started that sentence." If she didn't know better, she would have said that he sounded embarrassed. But Bellamy Blake was difficult to embarrass, so that couldn't be right.

"Ask you what?"

"Nothing."

"It didn't sound like nothing."

"It was definitely nothing."

"Well, if you're not going to be honest with me, maybe I'll just go play at bear hunting with Madi."

"That's a game? You let your seven-year-old foster daughter play at _bear hunting_?"

"I don't think I'm cut out for this parenting thing, Bellamy. Honestly. Not just because of stupid stuff like bear hunting and chores before radio time. I mean, I actually don't have a clue how to do this."

"You're Clarke Griffin. I'm pretty sure you can do anything."

"Thanks for the vote of confidence."

"On a more serious note, I seem to remember being involved in the raising of a child is absolutely terrifying, and you find yourself permanently believing you must be doing something terribly wrong, and fearing that you will screw the child up for life if you do. I'm pretty sure those feelings are all normal, and that actually, as long as you, you know, feed them and love them, they'll probably turn out fine."

"You seemed to do a pretty good job."

"You are too, I promise you. She adores you, and I'm guessing you're not about to let her starve to death, so I'd say you're doing pretty great."

"Thanks, Bellamy."

"Any time. It's what I'm here for."

"I miss you. So much." She cringed the moment the words left her lips, but there was no stopping them now.

"I miss you too." The sincerity in his voice brought bittersweet tears to her eyes. "I actually have really good news on that front, that I wanted to tell you almost as soon as we said goodbye this morning, but Raven got all decisive and told me I had to have breakfast and get on with my life rather than sitting here talking to you all day. Anyway, so she thinks she's solved the fuel problem. Or, rather, some strange team of her and Emori and Monty and Murphy have solved the fuel problem. So we really are going to be able to come back down to you as soon as it's safe radiation-wise."

"That's great news, Bellamy. Oh my goodness, you'd better congratulate them from me. Better yet, bring them to the radio so I can congratulate them. We can have a long-distance party of some kind."

"Maybe you and I can finally get that drink?"

"We do need to do that as soon as we're in the same actual place."

"Definitely. I'll suggest to the others that maybe we can hang out tomorrow? Tonight seems to be date night."

"Yeah." She agreed, leaning back in her chair, relishing the opportunity to have Bellamy to herself for the evening. "That it does."

**a/n Thanks for reading!**


	9. Chapter 9

**Thank you for all your positive feedback in the form of follows and favourites and reviews. I hope you enjoy reading this chapter - I may have had a little too much fun writing it!**

"Guys, I have news." Bellamy announced at breakfast the next morning, fidgeting with excitement as he waited for his friends to take their seats at the breakfast table.

"My news is better." Murphy decided, stealing his thunder.

"What news?" Asked Emori, looking, Bellamy thought, almost _alarmed_ and distinctly shifty. "You don't have news." She rushed to decide on her boyfriend's behalf. This was, he decided, somewhat suspicious behaviour. He would file this under _things to muse upon next time he was waiting impatiently for a radio call_.

"I might have news. You don't know." Murphy continued to be Murphy, but Bellamy couldn't help but feel that Emori looked relieved at the news that he was intending to be a bit of a tool rather than actually having any news.

"I, on the other hand, _do_ have news." Bellamy insisted, trying to regain control of the conversation.

"And I have algae!" Monty announced triumphantly, as everyone except Echo groaned loudly. Bellamy couldn't decide if she was actually insane enough to like algae, or if she was just trying to win over the rest of the group.

"Oh, joy." Raven trilled sarcastically. "Let me guess, is it green today?"

"Don't be rude, Raven." Harper admonished gently. "It's better than starving to death."

"Wow, Harper. Keep complimenting his cooking skills like that and he's bound to fall in love with you." Murphy deadpanned.

"Right. Stop it, everyone. I have news." Bellamy announced, loudly, aware that the expression on his face was disproportionately fierce for the occasion. He went unheeded.

"If the news is that you and Clarke got together, don't bother." Raven recommended, and Bellamy felt his ears growing warm in embarrassment and annoyance. "I called that one years ago. I think that time when you radioed from Mount Weather and she looked like she was about to faint?"

"In that case," Echo joined in, "I win. I called it when I met him in Mount Weather when he first arrived and he was all super motivated to go off and save the world. It was pretty obvious he had someone in mind."

"I have you all beaten." Monty insisted. "First argument, first day on the ground. When she tried to stop you opening the doors and you looked like you'd been hit in the head by a moderately sized bear."

"You can't possibly -" Bellamy started the sentence, then realised he had no idea how it would end. "Anyway. That is not the news."

"Because it wouldn't be news." Harper interjected. _Harper?_ It seemed absolutely everyone had it in for him this morning. Whatever. He would rise above it.

"So, as I was saying. My news. We're having a party via radio with Clarke and Madi tonight. In honour of getting in touch with them, and solving the fuel problem, and having a lot of things to celebrate."

"How does one have a party via radio, exactly?" Monty's eyebrows were twitching as he asked.

"Well, you know, we have a celebration, but we talk over the radio, so it's like we're all together." He felt defensive of this idea. It was a nice idea, dammit.

"I think there are other things that are better over the radio, but you refuse to find out..."

"Shut up, Murphy."

"So we sit around drinking moonshine while you hog the radio to talk to Clarke? I'm in." Raven decided.

"I – what – no. We _all_ talk to Clarke. Also Madi. That's what makes it a party."

"You're telling me you're not going to hog the radio." Raven looked skeptical at best.

"I will not hog the radio." He promised.

"Hmm. Who'll take a bet that he hogs the radio? A week's worth of latrine duties? Emori?"

"I'm not taking that bet. We both know you'll win." Emori shrugged.

"I will not hog the radio. I feel no need to hog the radio." Why was no one listening to him?

"I'll check on the moonshine situation after breakfast." Monty volunteered, ignoring him. Again. He was growing to expect it.

"Please do not provide snacks." Raven requested with a quirk to her lips. "I know people think snacks make a good party, but algae snacks do _not_ make a good party."

"I'll put together some music." Harper volunteered.

"I'll see if we can set up so that it plays to Clarke on Earth as well as up here." Emori suggested.

"I suppose I'll just grace this event with the pleasure of my company." Echo offered, one eyebrow raised, and Bellamy found himself laughing out loud. He wasn't used to hearing jokes from this particular crewmate.

"Well, it seems this promises to be the highlight of our extensive social calendar." Murphy's tone was, if possible, even more sarcastic than usual.

"Oh, be quiet, John. Your friend is excited. You could at least pretend to be happy for him." Bellamy wondered quite how they had all functioned before Emori walked into their lives.

"Thank you, Emori. I appreciate your support. Now, if you'll excuse me, I'm going to go tell Clarke and Madi that you're all really excited about this party, and that they'll hear from us later." His tone permitting no disagreement, he swept from the room. It was, he thought, really quite a good exit.

…...

Raven wouldn't necessarily have called it a _party_, but on reflection that was probably because she was naturally inclined to cynicism. As far as rather geographically distant friends in the midst of a nuclear apocalypse went, she supposed it was a pretty festive gathering. Madi was evidently having the time of her life, squealing with joy every time a new song came on and endlessly asking if they could play some old Earth game called _pass the parcel_, until Clarke had gently explained to her that she thought that might not work _so_ well as they were really quite a long way away from each other. If she hadn't witnessed it first hand, Raven would never have imagined that Clarke could be capable of being quite so maternal and, well, sensitive. She'd always thought of her as rather _abrupt_, really, until now.

Here came Monty, doing the next round with the moonshine, doling out generous measures into the assortment of mugs that served them as tableware. Raven gladly received a hefty share, and turned to her right to toast Emori, only to find that her friend seemed to be refusing the alcohol.

"No, thanks, Monty." She was saying now.

"What's wrong with you then?" Raven, almost as good at sensitivity as Clarke, asked.

"Nothing. Nothing at all." Emori assured her a little too quickly. "I just don't fancy it, you know? I'll leave it to those who'll appreciate it more. You can have my serving." She smiled at Raven, who felt it was at least a little forced.

"Right. Sure." This, she felt, was not a likely story.

Emori was saved from her further questioning by Bellamy bounding over to them, doing an uncanny impression of one of those overenthusiastic puppies Raven had seen on old Earth footage.

"You see? I said this would be fun. Isn't this fun?" Raven was beyond pleased to see him this happy. Watching him mourn Clarke had not been a fun experience, to say the least.

"It's great, Bellamy. It was a good idea. Madi seems to be having the time of her life."

"Isn't she a great kid? I'm so pleased Clarke's not on her own down there." Raven privately thought that Madi and Bellamy seemed to have taken to one another rather quickly, and it would surely not be long until the child started referring to Bellamy as _dad_, and sniggered slightly at the idea before she could stop herself.

"What is it?" Bellamy asked, annoyingly perceptive as ever.

"Nothing. Nothing at all." Raven assured him. Hmm. There seemed to be a lot of _nothing at all_ doing the rounds tonight.

She was saved by Harper beckoning them over to the radio.

"Madi has demanded stories, you guys. About our lives and our time on the ground. Who's up first?"

"I would remind you that she's _seven_." Clarke's voice came over the radio. "Please keep it age appropriate. If we could leave aside some of my more ruthless decisions and some of Bellamy's life choices from our first week or so on the ground, that would be excellent. I'll, erm, explain those to her when she's a little older."

Harper laughed aloud at that.

"I'm not sure there's any explaining some of those _life choices_ of Bellamy's, Clarke." Raven began to feel a little uncomfortable, having been part of one of those life choices herself. "Thank goodness he settled down a bit once he got to know you."

"What are you guys talking about?" Madi's voice piped up over the radio.

"Nothing that matters any more." Bellamy rushed to reassure her. "Let's have a story."

"How about the story of Jasper leading the forty-seven inside Mount Weather?" Monty suggested quietly.

There was a beat of silence, then -

"That sounds perfect, Monty." Said Clarke. "Would you be able to tell that for us?"

Raven saw Monty reach out for Harper's hand, then he began to speak.

…...

Madi had gone to get ready for bed after Monty's story, after much convincing from Clarke, and the party – OK, perhaps it was more of a gathering, he had to admit it – was starting to drift to a close up on the Ring, too. Emori had been the first to call it a night, citing tiredness, which had Bellamy cocking an incredulous eyebrow at the efficient young woman he was pretty sure had never been tired in her entire life before. Murphy followed not long after, considerably the worse for wear from moonshine and visibly worried about Emori's unusual behaviour, in spite of her insistence that he shouldn't be worried. Harper and Monty were gathered by the radio, speaking quietly to Clarke and giggling softly. It was pretty wonderful, he decided, to see all his friends so happy after such a tough time on the ground, but all the same he couldn't help missing it. Stale air and the distance between him and Clarke were not his favourite things. Echo and Raven had both hit the moonshine with a good measure of enthusiasm, and were now dancing chaotically to Harper's playlist, a mess of limbs and laughing faces, as he wandered over to join them.

"Great party." Raven hiccuped in his face, never having really been one for boundaries.

"Yeah." He was aware he was smiling like an idiot, but he figured he had eighteen months of abject misery to make up for.

"Do you think she knows about our poor life choice?" Raven was half-yelling at him now, with no regard for the fact a terrifyingly ruthless spy was _right there_, and he wondered whether the Ark had just jolted beneath the soles of his shoes or whether it was his heart making that strange stuttering motion.

"I... I don't know, Raven." There was no point pretending he didn't know what she was talking about.

"Hey, relax, Bellamy. She wouldn't _care_. She's like the most forgiving person I know." Raven's arms were moving more than normal, in a sort of sweeping alcohol-induced way.

"You're probably right." He said, but he wasn't sure he _felt_ it.

"I always am. All the same, I think I should tell her."

"What? No. You absolutely should not." Why was drunk Raven so convinced that telling Clarke about his past sexual encounters was a good idea? "Not tonight, at least." He hedged. "If you still want to have some honest heart-to-heart with her when you're sober, go for it." She seemed to contemplate this carefully.

"OK." She agreed.

"Good."

"I am drunk. I shall bed." She proclaimed suddenly, and stumbled from the room, and left Bellamy standing there, feeling an amused Echo's stare.

"Relax." She repeated Raven's earlier advice. "Clarke loves you, you love Clarke, anyone who's ever met the pair of you knows that. The fact that, it seems, somehow you and Raven once had sex is neither here nor there. It is, however, really very funny." At that, she revealed her own drunkenness in a fit of giggles. He frowned, but it made her no more grave. Why was everyone set on ignoring him today?

"I don't know what you're talking about." He needed to practise saying that with more conviction. He wasn't going to fool anyone at this rate.

"Yeah, you do." She insisted. "Night, Bellamy. Great party. Say thanks for me to Clarke for "hosting" too I guess."

"Yeah, of course. Night."

He walked over to Monty and Harper, who had clearly seen the others leave and decided that was their cue to call it a night as well.

"Night, Bellamy. Don't stay up too late." Monty grinned and pulled him into an enthusiastic hug. Maybe he'd had a little too much algae juice too.

"Goodnight, Bellamy. Night, Clarke. Sleep well." Harper shepherded her boyfriend out of the room.

"Clarke? You still there?" He asked into the radio.

"Me? No. Thought I'd go to bed without saying goodnight to you." He could practically hear her rolling her eyes.

"I choose not to rise to your sarcasm. Echo says thanks for co-hosting, albeit in an unconventional way, by the way."

"That's nice of her. She seems more fun than I expected."

"Yeah, agreed. To be fair, though, everyone's a bit more fun with less threat of immediate death, it turns out."

"That does not surprise me. Have the others all gone to bed, then?"

"Yeah. I think Emori's not well or something, she's been acting a bit weird recently and she went to bed early. Murphy basically followed her. Raven stayed long enough to get absolutely smashed and embarrass everyone."

"Nice. Standard Raven. So I think I should maybe go at some point and check that this child I'm responsible for has actually gone to bed and isn't, I don't know, running around the bear caves or jumping in the river or something."

"Seems reasonable. I should maybe go and check that these adults I seem to be responsible for were not too inebriated to get themselves safely back to their rooms."

"Not easy, being in charge, is it?" She quoted his words of just over two years ago and he laughed from deep in his belly, the alcohol having lowered his guard somewhat.

"I understand a very wise man once said that." He offered.

"Oh, absolutely." She agreed. "A man for whom I have the deepest respect and admiration."

"OK, now I know you're being sarcastic." He teased her.

"What gave me away?" She asked. "Was it the eye roll?"

"I wish." He mused, suddenly sombre. "I miss being able to see your face."

"Because it makes it easier to tell when I'm taking the piss? Or was that another one to add to my list of your awkward attempts at compliments?" Her voice was, he thought, not quite as light and carefree as it should be as she asked the question.

"Another one for the compliment list." He assured her. "I'm still practising. They'll improve over the next three and a half years, I promise"

"I should hope so. You can do better than that." She paused for a moment, as if considering something, then - "I miss your face too, by the way."

"Thanks." He thought that maybe he was in danger of hurting himself, smiling this widely. Surely his jaw was not built for this.

"Bed time?" She asked.

"I suppose so." He agreed reluctantly.

"Goodnight, then. Sleep well. And please consider this as a verbal goodnight hug." She offered, sounding slightly nervous at the idea.

"You sleep well too. And look after yourself down there. Please avoid savage mutant animals, etc. Here is a verbal goodnight hug from me, which is obviously better than your attempt at a verbal hug, because it is redeemable for an actual _in person_ hug in three and a bit years."

"I look forward to it." He could hear her smile. "Speak to you tomorrow."

"Bye." He released the call button.

"Lots of love." He told the empty room.

**a/n Thanks for reading!**


	10. Chapter 10

**a/n Thank you for your reviews and follows and favourites and general positivity. Happy reading!**

"John? You awake yet?" Emori's voice sounded in his ear, and he made a noncommittal grunting noise by way of response.

"I'm taking that as a yes. Come on, we have somewhere to be." She dropped a soft kiss on his cheek and rolled away, leaving the bed and, by the sound of it, making a start on getting dressed. He allowed himself to wonder for a moment why she was still _here_, when really it was quite late in the morning, and whether that whole date night idea followed by trying to be a bit more boyfriend-ish yesterday had maybe achieved something after all.

"We do? Where?" He asked in some confusion. It seemed a better idea than asking why she hadn't already run off to play with her engineer friend.

"There's something we need to talk to Clarke about."

"There is?" He wondered, mind spinning. What was this about? Was this something to do with her being tired recently? Was she sick? Or was it something very trivial, and was he getting anxious for nothing?

"I said we'd call this morning, before breakfast, and that doesn't give us very long now. Come on, get dressed." She shoved an assortment of clothing at his chest and stood there, staring expectantly, looking very fierce and very beautiful, and he risked a quick kiss on her lips before he followed her instruction.

"Are you going to tell me what this is about?" He asked, as they walked hand in hand towards the Earth Monitoring Station to use the radio.

"Not yet." She squeezed his hand. "I want Clarke's opinion first."

"OK then. Well, this isn't at all concerning." He said, making it clear to her that, in fact, he found it really quite concerning.

"I don't think you need to be worried." She assured him. "I think we just need to talk to Clarke."

"Yes, you made that bit quite clear. Literally the only bit of this entire situation that I'm up to speed with." By now, they had made their way to the room in question and were taking seats near the radio. Emori reached for the call button, and John leaned back in his chair, wondering why, exactly, he needed to be here at all.

"Clarke?"

"Emori, hi. And is Murphy there?"

"Hi, this is me."

"Great. So what did you guys want to talk about?"

"I guess I had a question." Emori was saying now, and this rather formidable woman he loved suddenly sounded rather nervous and he couldn't quite work that one out. "It's a question I'm pretty sure I already know the answer to, but I wanted your opinion all the same. Just to be sure. I mean, you are the closest to a doctor we're going to get." John sat up in panic at that. "Anyway, yeah, so, I think I know what's going on, but what would you say it meant if a woman hadn't, you know, had a period in a couple of months and found herself sometimes feeling a bit sicky and tired and – John will attest to this – sometimes being a bit short tempered for not a good reason, and, yeah? That?" He felt his jaw drop, and wondered how on Earth he had missed all this. Because even _he_ knew the answer to that question. Had he really been doing so badly at this whole boyfriend thing that he hadn't even noticed she was _pregnant_?

"It would mean I need to congratulate you, and ask you if you know how long this has been happening for?"

"Getting on for three months I think." She said in a small voice.

"Well, looks like the Ark will have a new addition in about six months' time."

"Do you think it is a congratulating situation?" Emori was asking now, concern knitting her brow. "Do you think we can deal with this up here? I mean, we don't have a doctor, and I don't know whether there's going to be enough air or water or how we're going to get him or her back down to Earth again, and, yeah, I'm a bit stressed out at the idea?"

"He or she will just take my place, right? You were expecting eight, and there will be eight. And Bellamy has quite a lot of experience of helping with babies, I seem to remember."

"Yeah, I guess. I hope so. Thanks, Clarke."

"You're welcome. I'll leave you to share the good news with everyone. Speak later." The voice on the radio disappeared, and he realised he was still staring, open-mouthed, at Emori.

"Are you going to sit there looking horrified all day?"

"This isn't _horrified_, Emori. It's _terrified_. We're having a _baby_? I can't imagine anyone less qualified to be a father."

"And I can't imagine starting a family with anyone else." She reassured him briskly. "Now pull yourself together. You'll be fine. It's not like you're the one who has to actually carry a foetus around for nine months."

"You're right. I'm... sorry I've not handled this well, Emori. Really. How did I not even notice you were pregnant?"

"You're kind of an idiot. I knew what I was getting myself into."

"I'm going to do better. Really. I'm going to have my work cut out if I'm going to be even half the dad my father was. And I'm going to do better at looking after you. I promise." He reached out for her hand.

"Please, since when do I need looking after? Shall we go tell everyone the news, or do you need to sit here panicking for a bit longer?"

"How are you so calm about this?"

"I've had the best part of three months to get used to the idea."

"But you didn't want to tell me before now?" He asked, saddened at the thought.

"Not until I was sure. It was quite good timing getting back in touch with Clarke. And... I don't know, you've been weirdly _kind_ and affectionate the last couple of days and it seemed like you might not mind the idea. I was kind of worried you'd freak out and ditch me, before." She informed the floor next to her feet, looking uncharacteristically shy, and he breathed a sigh of relief that it seemed by his actions of the last couple of days he'd managed to ensure they continued to have a relationship rather than only sex.

"Never." He stated, with a vehemence that seemed to surprise her but came only naturally to him. "I love you. And although I'm still struggling to wrap my head around this whole baby thing, I know I'll love our kid too."

…...

It wasn't a surprise that Murphy was late for breakfast, Bellamy thought, because it happened rather often, and to be fair there was a decent chance his friend was nursing a bit of a hangover. He was positively shocked, however, that Emori wasn't there, because she was normally up at the crack of dawn conniving with Raven. He rather hoped that this was because the two of them were enjoying some quality time together, and not because all that unexpected _tiredness_ Emori had been talking about was the precursor to some substantial illness that had her laid low.

"Do you think we should go look for them?" He asked the room at large, as they all sat around staring at each other and wondering whether to start on the algae.

"No." Raven decided. "Absolutely not. No one here wants to risk walking in on them in the act, I'm pretty sure."

"Thanks for that mental image, Raven." Echo shivered slightly and Bellamy found himself laughing. He was interrupted by Emori and Murphy walking into the room, hand in hand. There was definitely something afoot, he decided, because Emori had a sort of sheepish smile and something of a _glow_ about her, and Murphy had a dazed expression that made it look like he'd recently been hit over the head by a large blunt object.

"You're late." Raven snapped at them, ever to the point.

"I think we have a pretty good excuse, Reyes." Murphy managed to summon up some of his usual fire.

"What's going on, guys?" Harper, always slightly better at human interaction than the rest of them, was clearly onto something.

"We're expecting a baby!" Emori announced, and was met by a shocked silence. Bellamy was pretty sure he could read utter disbelief on Monty's face, and sheer happiness on Harper's, and complete shock on Echo's.

Personally, he didn't think he'd ever found anything _less_ surprising.

"Congratulations!" He jumped from his seat and rushed over to slap Murphy on the back and pull Emori into a hug. It seemed his lead spurred the rest of the crew into action – before long the happy couple were in the middle of a huddle of humanity and Bellamy pulled away to take in the scene. He couldn't help but feel this was going to be a good thing for all of them, something good to celebrate for a change, a bit of new life instead of everyone they cared about dying around them. Eventually Monty managed to convince everyone that it was time for algae, and Murphy made a big fuss of helping Emori to a seat and insisting that she be given an extra serving of breakfast. They all laughed when all he received for his trouble was an affectionate slap on the wrist and her insistence that she was perfectly fine, thank you very much.

"So are you going to spend the whole day patronising Emori, or can you spare some time to train with me again?" He asked with a grin. He figured that Emori could probably use a break from this enthusiastic hovering, and Murphy could probably use a bit of normal routine. He also wondered if, perhaps, his friend might want an opportunity to chat about the whole impending fatherhood thing without an audience.

"I'd love to, but I was thinking I might spend some time with Monty, if that's OK?" For the second time that morning, the Head of Algae Production looked absolutely flummoxed. "I figure it's about time I learn how to do something useful." He tried for his usual sarcastic tone, and everyone seemed to decide to help him out by pretending he had succeeded.

"Erm, yeah, sure." Monty made a valiant attempt to gather his wits. "But you would probably get bored watching me watch algae all day. Maybe spend some time with Bellamy too?" It sounded, he thought, like Monty was a little terrified at the idea of an entire day with Murphy.

"Definitely spend some time with me too." He agreed. "I need someone to babysit me. If you don't hang out with me, I'll basically just sit in Earth Monitoring moping all day and waiting for Clarke to call, after all. And that will just annoy your pregnant girlfriend. So I figure it's in your best interests to come train with me."

"Well, when you put it like that..."

They both went to the algae farm after breakfast, in the end, because Bellamy quite liked this whole spending time with people thing and it really did seem like a better idea than moping next to a radio for the entire day. He really wanted to call Clarke and tell her Murphy and Emori's exciting news, and also to find out whether she'd slept well and what she'd had for breakfast and every other minute detail of her day, but he figured it was probably more socially acceptable if he did something useful with his time first. To that end, he sparred with Murphy for a little while, and then they lifted some heavy things in their improvised gym for a bit, and then he did some reading, and all in all he was feeling rather proud of his self control by the time he sat down to supper. Admittedly, he did find himself downing his food quite quickly, and not entirely concentrating on the conversation, and excusing himself as soon as it was polite to do so. OK, maybe before it was polite to do so. No one else had actually finished eating, but he figured they were all so busy being excited about the whole baby thing that it wouldn't bother them.

He heard her voice issuing from the radio as he entered the room, and grinned a little at her good timing.

"... because we actually had some duck left from yesterday, rather than having to go fishing, so, yeah, here we are."

"We had algae, you'll be shocked to hear."

"Oh, hey. Didn't realise you were actually there."

"I mean, I can leave if you like, and you can get back on with talking to yourself?"

"No, eighteen months of that was enough for a lifetime. So, how was your day?"

"Pretty great. I have exciting news. Well, I mean, it's not really my news, but I'm going to tell you anyway because it's exciting. Emori's expecting."

"Yes." She replied, sounding amused. "I know."

"You do?"

"Uhuh."

"How?"

"Sometimes I talk to people who are not you. Not very often, admittedly, but yeah. They called me this morning. Wanted the opinion of an almost-doctor before they told everyone."

"That does make sense, I guess."

"I told them you'd be pretty useful, by the way. From helping with O. So good luck with that."

"I'm actually really looking forward to it. I think it'll do us good to have something positive to bond over, rather than just the struggle for survival."

"Yeah." She sounded a bit wistful, he thought.

"You'll be part of it too, you know. I'm pretty sure you'll get to share everything with us even though you're not physically here." He rushed to reassure her.

"I hope so. I'm really happy for them, obviously. It just makes me feel a bit lonely." She told him, and he felt his heart break for her.

"I get that."

"I don't feel like I ever really got to bond with any of you over much that was positive. Mostly I remember more of the surviving."

"I mean, yeah, it was mostly surviving, but I remember plenty of pretty great bits too. That time when we had a Unity Day party and you tried to show everyone you were fun? That was pretty great until the whole shooting and bridge thing happened. Bonding over oxymorons while the world was ending? I suppose that's not everyone's idea of positive, but... I'm never going to forget that conversation, that's for sure." That was something of an understatement, he thought. The words they shared that day had been the soundtrack to his failed attempts to sleep for eighteen months.

"Yeah, me neither." She sounded wistful, he thought.

"Do you want me to tell you about Murphy trying to learn how to grow algae now? I figure that would cheer anyone up?"

He didn't know how to show a woman who was thousands of miles away that he thought there was plenty of _positive_ in their history, and that, to him, their time together was about more than just surviving, but he spent the rest of the evening attempting nonetheless to do exactly that.

**a/n Thanks for reading! Next time: an adorable couple of scenes in which Madi asks difficult questions.**


	11. Chapter 11

**a/n Thank you to everyone who has read, reviewed, followed and favourited this story. You are all excellent folks. Happy reading!**

As Clarke tried to teach Madi how to weed their small vegetable plot, she found herself noticing that she was, for the first time since her father had been floated, feeling truly _happy_. Not in a jumping-for-joy sort of way, of course – she didn't think happiness was like that for her, not anymore, not since she lost her innocence and naivety by the wayside of her struggle for survival on this damn planet – but in a calm, warm, _content_ sort of way. In a way that felt really quite a lot like one of Bellamy's hugs, now she came to think about it.

They'd fallen into a comfortable routine over the last few days, the schedule they kept on the Ring and the habits they had adopted on the ground fusing nicely together into a slightly odd long-distance family life with their evening radio calls at the centre of it. Sometimes Bellamy called alone, sometimes with the whole crew. Sometimes during the day someone else would get in touch – most often Raven and John, of course, brimming over with questions about Emori's pregnancy, but even _Echo_ had called a couple of days ago, with some utter rubbish about _just wanting to say hi_ that failed to veil a surprisingly fierce desire to know how she might best look out for the young woman who was expecting.

All in all, she thought, as she caught herself on the verge of destroying a perfectly good carrot seedling through pure inattention, she was beginning to feel like part of a _kru_ for the first time in quite a while.

"Clarke? Can I ask you something?" Madi piped up, clearly less than thrilled with her morning lesson and distracted teacher.

"Sure, Madi." She replied absently, preoccupied now with wondering how it was that dandelions were so good at surviving apocalypses.

"So you've told me loads of stories about Murphy and Emori and him declaring his love in the middle of a lab and now them having a baby, and you've told me about Monty and Harper falling in love when that horrible ALIE woman was trying to take over, and about Lincoln saving Octavia from his own people. But you never tell me _anything_ cool about you and Bellamy." There was a pleading tone to the child's voice that made Clarke freeze, understanding all too clearly where this conversation was going. "When did he first tell you he loved you?" She concluded by asking, with all the naive simplicity of her seven years.

Clarke took a calming breath, and wondered whether there was, in fact, any good answer to this can of worms. How did one go about explaining the complexity of real, confusing, adult relationships to a small child?

"I suppose our relationship isn't quite like those other ones." She decided to lead with that because it seemed to be the simplest place to start. "He doesn't _tell_ me he loves me," she continued, wondering quite where her own tongue was taking her, "because he doesn't need to. He shows me instead." She concluded, realising for the first time as she said it that it was, in fact, true.

"What do you mean?" Asked the girl, whose world-view apparently only permitted clear-cut confessions of love.

"He helps me with difficult things, supports me when I have to make tough decisions. Once I had to kill a lot of bad guys to save our friends and he wouldn't let me do it alone." She supposed that was about as child-friendly as a description of his support at Mount Weather could get. "He forgives me when I make mistakes, but also tells me when I need to hear that I'm wrong. He tries to help me find happiness when I'm sad. And he always, always, protects me, no matter how scary or dangerous that is for him."

"I see." Madi said thoughtfully. "That does sound good. Maybe even better than yelling in the middle of a lab."

"Yeah." Clarke agreed, staring vaguely into the middle distance, dandelions long forgotten. "I think it is."

"Do you do that for him, too?" Madi's curiosity was apparently not yet exhausted.

"I try" She agreed with a wry smile. "But I don't always do well at it."

…...

Emori had expected to hate having people worrying about her _condition_ all the time, had expected to feel patronised and trapped and at least a little smothered. It was one of the reasons she had kept quiet for so long, knowing that as soon as she put the news out there she would become someone who needed, in the eyes of her crewmates, to be _looked after_.

To her surprise, it turned out it wasn't all bad.

John hadn't become a new man overnight, of course – frankly, she'd have been horrified if he had – but he seemed to have decided to use his wits to make people laugh, now, more than to belittle them, and she rather liked that. And she definitely rather liked the way he made a point of spending some time together, just the two of them, every day, even if it was just to sit and chat about how her latest project with Raven was going. He had unfortunately also adopted an annoying habit of following her around asking if she needed to sit down or whether she'd got enough to eat or if she was feeling OK, but thankfully he'd dialled that back a bit since Echo had cheerfully slammed him into a wall and told him to _let the woman breathe_. That particular incident had also had the unexpected side effect of Echo starting to join John and Bellamy for their training sessions, and this morning at breakfast they'd talked Harper into giving it a go too. It appeared that their crew was starting to come together as a family, ready to welcome this new addition they all seemed to be anticipating just as eagerly as she was.

"Are you listening to a word I'm saying?" Raven asked, somewhat irately.

"No." She answered promptly, because, in fact, she hadn't been.

"I'll start again then. So, to convert the rocket from hydrazine -"

"Emori." John interrupted as he entered the room, hand outstretched in invitation. "We're getting out of here. Come on. Romance calls."

"Excuse me, Murphy." Raven was apparently not pleased with this development. "We've got work to do."

"Screw you, Reyes." He offered surprisingly cheerfully. "She needs to rest."

Emori stifled a giggle, knowing that rest was decidedly not what he had in mind, and shrugged apologetically in Raven's general direction as she allowed herself to be led from the room.

…...

Bellamy was getting better at doing productive things with his time rather than sitting at the radio worrying that Clarke might disappear again. This afternoon, for example, he was joining Harper and Echo for a lesson in how to speak Trig that he was only too happy to admit could be going rather better. He'd had the basics mastered for a while, could say who he was and that he was a skyperson, but it seemed there was rather more to it than that.

He breathed a sigh of relief when Raven strode into the room looking determined. Perhaps he could help her with whatever it was and come back to his Trig lesson another time.

"Bellamy, radio. It's Madi for you." She announced, and he felt his heart jump into his throat. Why would the girl be radioing him in the middle of the afternoon? The only reason that sprang to his mind was that something had happened to Clarke.

"What happened?" He asked in a panic, jumping to his feet and striding towards the door.

"Hey, relax." Raven reached out and caught his arm as he made to walk past her. "Nothing's happened. I asked that before I came here, idiot. Clarke's fine. I think the kid just wants some father-daughter bonding time."

"Wha- what?" That last sentence had rather caught him by surprise, he thought.

"You heard me. Get going." She made a sort of flapping motion with her hand as if to herd him through the door. Feeling slightly dazed, he complied, and found himself seated before the radio before he quite realised what had happened.

"Hello? Madi?"

"Hi, Bellamy."

"Raven said you wanted to talk. Is everything OK?" Raven had said everything was OK, but even so, he was going to need to hear it from Madi as well.

"Yeah, everything's fine. Clarke just went out for the afternoon to get some special medicine plants and she said I should stay here and pluck some pigeons. But that's boring so I called you instead." He sighed in relief.

"Don't blame me when she gets mad at you." He warned her with a chuckle.

"She never gets mad at me." She said with simple confidence.

"How's your day going then, Madi?" He asked, wondering what, exactly, they were supposed to talk about.

"I had lessons this morning. Farming then reading."

"I've just come from a lesson too, actually. I'm trying to learn Trig."

"How's it going?"

"Not well." He admitted. "How were your lessons?"

"Reading was cool. Clarke writes me all these stories about you guys and then we read them together." His heart melted a little at that, as he imagined her alone down there keeping them with her through her words.

"That does sound fun. Which is your favourite?"

"It used to be Murphy and Emori but I have a new one now. Clarke told me it this morning."

"Yeah?" He prompted her, relaxing into the conversation. It was every bit as straightforward as he remembered from raising his sister, the art of sitting back and letting a small child prattle away.

"Yeah. My favourite story is about you and Clarke, now. And how you love her so much that you help her do difficult things, and once she had to kill a load of bad guys and you were there so she didn't have to do it alone." Well, that changed things, he thought. She had really _told_ Madi that? It did sound like the child was quoting from an actual conversation.

"She told you about that?" He asked, slightly at as loss.

"Yeah. She told me all about it. About how you don't have to tell her you love her, because you show her." He welled up a little at the thought, but he also found himself coming to a sudden decision. He _did_ have to tell her, actually. She deserved to hear the words as well as see the signs. "I want someone to love me like that one day."

"I hope you find someone like that too, kid. It's pretty great when you do." He cleared his throat and continued. "It sounds like she missed out the most important part of the story, though. The part where she does the same for me." He couldn't quite believe he was having this conversation with Clarke's _daughter_, rather than Clarke herself, but it seemed there wasn't much to be done about that now.

"I asked her about that. She said she tries but she doesn't always do it very well."

"She does it perfectly." He responded, surprising even himself with the conviction in his voice. "Sometimes I think I don't do it well enough. Sometimes I let her down." He admitted, picking idly at the corner of the table with his nails and trying to pretend he wasn't having this conversation with a seven-year-old.

"What do you mean?"

"I left her behind, Madi." He choked a little on the lump in his throat and tried again. "I left her there and came up here without her. And I can't undo that, now. However long I live, I will always be the man who left her behind." This had been his deepest regret for the last year and a half and he felt beyond vulnerable letting it out into air and space like this. And to a gossip-prone child, of all people.

"Oh, I wouldn't worry about that." Madi told him, as if it were the simplest thing in the world. "She's happy you're safe. And she met me, so that was good."

"Yeah. That was definitely good."

"And she said one of the ways you two show your love is by forgiving each other, so I'm pretty sure you're all good."

He didn't think he could reply to that, so he swallowed deeply and took a moment to move the conversation back to safer ground. "I'm looking forward to meeting you properly when we land."

"I can't wait! Will you teach me how to shoot? Clarke's been trying to teach me but she says you're a lot better. Also she says that seven is a bit young to start learning properly."

"Well, she's right on both counts there." He agreed with a grin firmly restored to his face.

"And she says you used to tell your sister bedtime stories. Will you tell me bedtime stories when you get here? But I suppose I'll be eleven then, and that might be a bit old for bedtime stories." She sounded rather downcast at the thought.

"How about this evening I tell you one when I call Clarke?" He suggested without hesitation. "I'm pretty sure stories still work over the radio."

"Would you do that? I'd like that."

"Then let's do that." He decided. After all, it was probably the only useful thing he could do as such a long-distance foster father.

…...

Clarke was only too happy to sit and listen as Bellamy told Madi the story of Theseus defeating the Minotaur. She couldn't help but feel that he seemed to be dedicating quite a lot of time to how invaluable Ariadne was to the whole operation, and how useful it always is for the hero if a very cunning woman is in love with him, and she grinned at his obvious analogy. It seemed that Madi hadn't been lying about the content of their conversation this afternoon. She'd been mortified, at first, on discovering that the child had taken it upon herself to interrupt Bellamy's afternoon and torment him with a rather impertinent choice of topic, but it seemed no harm was done. On the contrary, Bellamy sounded almost overjoyed as he told his story, but then again, the hero did vanquish the beast, so she supposed a little joy wasn't out of place.

"Thanks, Bellamy. Clarke was right. You are good at bedtime stories. I can't wait to learn how to shoot." That, she thought, was something of a non sequitur, but she'd take it up with him later.

"You're welcome, Madi. Sleep well."

"Goodnight, Bellamy." Madi stepped away from the radio and pulled her into a hug. "Night, Clarke."

"Night, Madi." She watched the girl scamper from the room and then picked up the handset.

"Thanks for doing that, Bellamy. You've made her week."

"No problem. I was honoured to be asked."

"How was your day?" She settled comfortably into her chair and looked forward to learning what he'd been up to.

"I love you." He informed her instead of answering her question, taking her rather by surprise, and then he continued in something of a rush. "I hear you already worked that out, but I wanted to tell you as well."

She allowed herself a couple of seconds to observe that the sunset seemed to have suddenly grown more beautiful, and the chair more comfortable, and the loneliness in her heart more manageable. It was funny, she thought, how _knowing_ something and _hearing it said_ were not quite the same after all.

"I love you too." She responded easily once she realised he was probably holding his breath on the other side of the space in between them. "I hear that's not a surprise to you either."

"To get back to your question, my day just improved dramatically."

"You still need to work on your compliments." She accused him with a grin.

"It doesn't sound like a complaint when I can _hear _that you're smiling."

It seemed that she could no longer keep anything at all hidden from this man.

**a/n Thanks for reading!**


	12. Chapter 12

**a/n Thanks to everyone who has been reading, reviewing, following and favouriting this story. It was particularly great to read such cheerful reviews from people who enjoyed the fluff last chapter. Happy reading!**

Being loved didn't change anything, of course. Bellamy knew this.

All the same, in the days that followed, he didn't quite _feel_ that way. He couldn't help but feel that, actually, Clarke suddenly seemed a good few thousand miles closer to him, for all that their geographical situation had not improved in the least. There was a newfound solidity to their relationship that had him, quite simply, jumping for joy, and this was a little problematic because he didn't want to make a big deal of this to their friends and have them mock or judge or simply _giggle_.

So it was that he engaged in a good deal of subterfuge in order to keep them off the metaphorical scent.

"What are you so damn happy about?" Raven asked him over breakfast the morning after the greatest evening of his life. No, that wasn't quite right. The greatest evening of his life had belonged to the day he found out Clarke was actually still alive. The second greatest evening of his life, then.

"I'm excited for Murphy and Emori." He told her cheerfully and not entirely untruthfully. "It'll be good to have a kid around the place."

She responded with a look that made it quite clear that she thought he was out of his mind and continued to toy with her algae.

Emori had a thoughtful expression on her face that he was pretty sure could not bode well. "Interesting you should say that, Bellamy. It's almost a week now since I told you my news, but you've only started grinning like an idiot this morning."

"How is Clarke, anyway?" Murphy joined in, and he cursed the fact that this particular happy couple were a little too good at working together.

"She's great." He told them, and left them to make of it what they would as he ate his algae with what could only be described as _enthusiasm_.

…...

Raven was fed up of playing messenger. Every time Clarke or Madi called, which was really rather _often_, she found herself jogging down the halls in search of Bellamy and that was an activity that her leg didn't particularly appreciate. It was great that the pair of them were alive, obviously, and she couldn't begrudge her friend the undisguised joy that had been painted on his face in recent days, but all the same, she thought it might be quite nice if they could work on their timing and he could answer his own damn calls.

So it was that this afternoon, as she heard the radio crackle to life, she felt her heart sink almost as much as she felt her face lift at the sound.

"Hello, Clarke here."

"I'll go get Bellamy, hang on."

"Raven? I actually wanted to speak to you."

"You – you did?" This was an unexpected development, she thought.

"Yeah. Is that OK? Is this a good time?"

"Sure, sure. You just took me by surprise."

"It would be nice to talk to you a little more rather than you running off to fetch Bellamy all the time." Clarke sounded a little nervous as she suggested that, she thought.

"He'd never forgive me if he knew I hogged the radio while you were on the line." It was both the truth and a convenient way to avoid admitting that she was pleased that Clarke wanted to speak to her.

"I promise not to tell him. How are you?"

"I'm well." She began, and reflected that no one had really bothered asking her that for a while. Mostly people seemed to expect her to be the one who could cope with anything. "Lots of things to fix, occasional space walks to do, the company of people I mostly tolerate."

"It sounds like you're in your element."

"Yeah."

"I actually wanted to ask your advice on something."

"I knew there had to be a good reason you were talking to me and not lover-boy." She teased to conceal the disappointment she felt at learning that Clarke had an ulterior motive beyond simply wanting to chat after all.

"I'm not going to rise to that. Anyway, so, there's lots of rubble at Polis, some of it's on top of the bunker so they aren't going to be able to get out when the radiation dies down. I'd like to make a start on clearing it. All I have is a rover and whatever I can scavenge from the remains of Arkadia. Thoughts?"

"Ooh, I do love a challenge. I'll have a think about it and ask Emori too. Can you go on a scouting mission so we know what we're dealing with? I need some idea of the quantity of rubble, the size of the pieces, material they're made from. Oh, and if there's anything at Arkadia that looks like winching or lifting equipment."

"OK. Sure. It'll have to be a pretty straightforward solution, I'm no engineer."

"Just as well - mechanics are far superior. We'll come up with something. And we can always help finish the job when we get there, bring a few extra bits of equipment down with us if need be."

"It'll be great to see you again. You know, Bellamy's not the only person I've missed."

"I know." She replied, because she was Raven Reyes, and she wasn't in the business of letting people know she was _moved_.

…...

Clarke enjoyed the bedtime stories that had fast established themselves as part of their evening routine over the last few days. In fact, she was beginning to suspect that she might enjoy them even more than Madi did. There was something rather moving about witnessing Bellamy's attempts to be all _nurturing_ and fatherly in spite of the unconventional circumstances. That said, she wasn't sure that this particular story was entirely age appropriate. It had started off innocently enough, with a hero called Jason who was on a quest – so much was fairly standard. But the bit where he exiled his wife and she went berserk and killed their children in revenge seemed a bit much. Madi, of course, was absolutely delighted by the melodrama of it all, and Bellamy was evidently relishing the opportunity to describe every gory detail, so she decided that probably she wouldn't achieve much by trying to interrupt or divert their attention. No, it would be a much better plan to simply sit back and enjoy the happiness of the two people in the world who mattered most to her.

At last, Madi allowed herself to be convinced that the story was over and took herself off to bed and Clarke had Bellamy to herself for the rest of the evening.

"I'm not sure that's my favourite of your bedtime stories." She told him, unable to repress a hint of a smile.

"It's a good story." From the tone of his voice she was pretty sure he was shrugging, but of course she couldn't actually _see._

"And yet not really suitable for a seven-year-old."

"It's entirely suitable for a seven-year-old. She loved it."

"You're a terrible influence on her."

"I like to think we make a good team, actually, Clarke. You teach her to use some sense and how to stay alive, and I teach her how to shoot things and tell her bloodthirsty bedtime stories."

"You're the worst father ever." She teased, but held her breath as soon as she realised what she'd said, because they hadn't ever quite put it in those terms before, this odd family life that they were building.

"Looks like I'm the best father she's going to get though." He replied cheerfully, sounding completely unconcerned by her choice of vocabulary.

"True. Thanks for everything you've done for her, Bellamy. The stories and those calls she thinks I don't know she makes whenever I leave her with chores to do."

"Dammit. I thought we'd managed to hide at least some of those." She had to laugh at that, because it had become absolutely obvious that the girl was chatting to him whenever she left her with the instruction that she was supposed to be fetching water or picking beans.

"Sorry. You can't hide anything from me. And small children aren't very good at covering their tracks, it turns out."

"I'll pass that wisdom on to Murphy and Emori."

"How are they? I haven't heard from them in a couple of days."

"They're fine. She's her usual self. He seems to be trying to become slightly more – I don't know – kind?"

"Yes, I got that impression. I mean, it's no surprise to me that he's trying to be kind to the mother of his child, Emori's always been special to him, hasn't she? But he seems to have become less _rude _when he speaks to me, and that's a bit odd."

"He started telling me these stories about his father when we were training today. I think he's taking life a bit more seriously all of a sudden."

"That's good. He'll be a great father if he can do that."

"So he's great but I'm _the worst father ever_?" He asked incredulously.

"I love you." She had discovered recently that reminding him of this was normally a good way of halting his complaints on any subject.

"I love you too, but that doesn't mean you're allowed to decide that _Murphy_ is better at parenting than I am."

"You know I wasn't being serious. You're a great dad, and I'm sure you'll be even better when you're not thousands of miles away."

"By the time I'm actually there Madi will be almost grown up. She might not need quite so much parenting." He sounded sad at the thought, and it gave her the courage to say what was on her mind.

"Maybe she'll end up with a brother or sister who needs parenting." She suggested quietly and not a little nervously.

"I'd like that." He told her immediately and rather emphatically. "I think that sounds like an excellent idea."

"Good." She wondered if perhaps she was in danger of injuring her jaw by smiling this widely.

"Yeah."

There was a pause in which she suspected that he was grinning at least as stupidly as she was and she wondered how to go about saying what she needed to say next.

"Bellamy, I'm sorry to ruin the moment, but I wanted to let you know that we're going on a bit of an expedition for a few days. We'll take the radio but we might not be calling very often. I'll try to check in once a day, of course, but please don't worry if you don't hear from us much."

"Oh. Right." She heard him sober up immediately. "Everything OK?"

"Yeah, nothing to worry about. Just – we'll be going on a bit of a road trip." She didn't want to tell him too much about their upcoming adventure to Polis just yet, because she didn't want him to worry about what she might find out about his sister's chances of getting out of there when the time came.

"Stay safe. Both of you."

"We will. Me and a small child in a nuclear wasteland - what could possibly go wrong?"

**a/n Thanks for reading!**


	13. Chapter 13

**a/n Thanks for your kind reviews on the last chapter and thank you to everyone who has encouraged me to keep going with this story. I'm finding this quite hard to write, which is a bit odd as usually I can hardly type quickly enough to keep up with all the Bellarke plot bunnies hopping round in my imagination. I'm sorry that this update is a bit short, and that I don't update this story very often, but I'm not giving up on it any time soon!**

Bellamy was familiar with the phrase _the tension is killing me_, of course, but he hadn't realised until Clarke and Madi went on their trip quite how true it could be. As he sat in the Earth Monitoring Station and waited for their evening call he could feel his heart hammering rather overenthusiastically in his chest. He wasn't even sure what there was to be nervous about, all things considered. They had said they would take a radio with them and try to call once a day, so really, from his point of view, the situation shouldn't even be that different from normal. But that logical train of thought could make no impact on the fact that the situation _was_ different from normal, somehow, knowing his family were down there and out on an expedition without him there to take care of them.

"Bellamy?" Emori walked into the room with a concerned expression on her face and a tool that he thought might have been used for soldering in her hand.

"Hey." He greeted her and made a poor attempt at a carefree smile.

"They'll be fine." She at least sounded kind, he thought, rather than dismissive, as she quickly caught on to the reason for his foul mood. "They've already survived the end of the world, they'll survive this little trip too."

"I hope so."

"You'll see. Come on, stop moping and tell me more about Octavia. I'm going to need to be prepared for it when this little one comes along." It was, he thought, the kind of of statement that ought to be accompanied by her placing a maternal hand on her belly, but of course, being Emori, she was instead gesturing at him in a vaguely threatening fashion with that tool that may, or may not, have been a soldering iron.

He was saved by having to pretend to hold a coherent and panic-free conversation by Raven striding into the room. It never ceased to amaze him, really, how she could still _stride_ everywhere in that frankly terrifying fashion despite her brace.

"Do you ever leave this room?" She asked him by way of greeting. He offered a rather feeble shrug in response.

"Be kind." Emori admonished her friend gently.

"He survived eighteen months of thinking she was dead, I think he can survive her going away for a couple of days."

"I don't know if you remember this, but he didn't survive very well."

"I am here, you know." He told them, but was largely ignored.

"We need to fix that door on deck B." Raven told Emori as if he wasn't there.

"On it." She replied, waving the probably-a-soldering-iron and heading for the door.

"We're leaving." Raven informed him, finally recalling his existence. "Go do a workout or something and stop being weird."

He resented that, he decided. He wasn't being _weird_. He was just in love.

…...

Clarke felt a little pathetic when she admitted to herself that, actually, she'd been looking forward to calling Bellamy all day. She thought it might even have been the thing that got her through the day, through the long drive to Arkadia, avoiding potholes left behind by Praimfaiya, through the painstaking search of her former home. She didn't know why she'd bothered, really. There was nothing here except ghosts.

Well, nothing except ghosts and, of all things, a couple of chests filled with explosives.

She was no Raven, of course, but given that development and the distinct lack of anything that even vaguely resembled lifting equipment she supposed that the new plan was likely to consist of blowing up the debris covering the bunker. Hopefully there was a way to do that without damaging the seal. Hopefully her team of genius engineers would be able to explain such a thing to her.

Hopefully Bellamy was missing her as much as she was missing him.

It was a complete non sequitur, of course, but her brain had always been markedly less good at logic than usual whenever Bellamy was involved. She knew she needed to finish searching the remains of the settlement while she still had the daylight to work by, but she wanted nothing more than to curl up next to the radio and feel the hug of his voice and bask in the warmth of his concern while she mourned for the friends they had lost here. She was aching to tell him about the horror of discovering the bodies in what used to be the dining hall, desperate for him to take some of the burden away from her. It wasn't as if she could share it with a seven-year-old, after all.

She forced herself to keep working until the last glow of light fled from the sky before taking herself back to the rover where Madi was drawing happily. The girl had pottered around helping her to search for the best part of the afternoon but had long since given up on the cheerless task.

"You OK?"

"Yes. Is it time to call Bellamy now?"

She wanted to tell Madi that they should wait until after supper, pretend some semblance of a normal routine, but she wasn't sure she was capable of waiting any longer.

"Yes. Yes it is."

She picked up the radio, and arranged the portable dish in a hopeful manner, and settled down to make the call. She briefly wondered if she ought to let Madi speak first, as had become normal for them of late, but she found herself rather too desperate for that verbal hug to tolerate the idea.

"Bellamy? It's Clarke. And Madi, too, of course. We're at Arkadia. It's been... it's been quite a day. You wouldn't believe it, Praimfaiya has just... it's brutal." She could feel that she was in danger of rambling but couldn't entirely bring herself to stop. "It doesn't look like home anymore, Bellamy. It doesn't look like home. And the bodies. Of the people who stayed. I suppose Jasper is here, and I just – I can't -"

She broke off, crying softly, aware of the comforting warmth of Madi burrowing into her side.

"You're OK, Clarke. You're OK." Bellamy's calm voice on the radio washed over her. "I'll be there with you so soon, I promise. And then we'll find a way to say goodbye to them properly, have a real memorial for them. And we'll rebuild, and we'll make a new home. Together."

She took a few calming breaths before she attempted a reply. "I missed you. All day. All I could think about was how much easier this would be if you were with us."

"I know. I wish I was there too. I'm so sorry I left you, Clarke." She thought his voice sounded distinctly damp now, too.

"That wasn't what I meant. I'm sorry, it came out wrong. I'm pleased you left, because I'm pleased you lived."

"We'll be back together again soon, I promise." There was a short pause before he continued. "I missed you so much today, too. It's silly, because sometimes we only speak once a day anyway, it's just – I felt like I should have been with you."

"You are with us." Madi interrupted now, visibly bored of crying adults and repetitive conversations. "You're always with us, Bellamy. You're with us in the stories Clarke tells and the pictures she draws. And you're with us in your heart, too. Clarke told me that once." She concluded with an air of slight impatience.

"She's very wise, your mother."

**a/n Thanks for reading!**


	14. Chapter 14

**a/n Thanks, awesome humans, for the reviews last chapter - they were so thorough and detailed which always makes my day. Happy reading!**

Autumn turned to winter and a bright, crisp dawn saw Clarke perched on a rock overlooking the river, sketchbook in hand as she attempted to capture the waterfall quite literally frozen in time. It had not been an _easy_ couple of months, she reflected as her pencil picked out the eerie form of the tendrils of ice where the water usually flowed, but it had at least not been as difficult as she might have foreseen. Clearing the debris burying the bunker in Polis had turned out to be an exercise in following Raven's painstaking instructions rather than a feat of physical strength, and through the magic of explosives the door would be clear when the time came.

She missed her friends, of course she did, she missed them so much that it hurt, even thought she knew they were alive, even though she could speak to them. She pushed that thought away through sheer force of will and decided she was supposed to be joyful. She was very much looking forward to the birthday party for Murphy that was to take place that evening, for example. He didn't seem like a very _birthday party_ sort of a person, she thought, but from what he'd said to her at Emori's last radio check-up, he'd allowed his friends to persuade him that surviving twenty years with everything the universe had thrown at him was an achievement worth celebrating.

Bellamy had told the story rather differently, she remembered with a smile. He'd said that Emori had told him outright that he wasn't allowed to be a father without attending a birthday party at least once, so that he knew how to spoil his child silly on their birthday in turn. It seemed that all anyone had to do to get John Murphy to agree to anything these days was to remind him that his girlfriend was six months pregnant. It was a little bit humbling, Clarke thought, realising that all along this man she had so easily misjudged because of his brash attitude and survivor's instinct was actually capable of being so caring.

She frowned at the scene before her for a moment, contemplating how best to capture the swirling patterns caught within the ice where the tumbles and eddies had been fixed in place. There was something about the phenomenon that reminded her uncannily of the curls of hair that fell across Bellamy's forehead.

No, that was a ridiculous thought. She needed to get a grip on this new and rather pathetic _lovestruck_ side of her personality, she resolved. Just because her lover was thousands of miles away did not give her permission to moon over him to the extent that she saw him in a _waterfall_, for goodness' sake. Had she called him her lover? Well, she thought that was what he was. They loved each other, that much they'd established, but with their current geographical situation it was less than clear to her whether he loved her in exactly the way she loved him. She hoped more than anything that he meant it in the _making love_ sense, because that was certainly what she was thinking about him – more often than she cared to admit, actually, and more often when she was lying restlessly awake in bed at night than could possibly be good for her sanity. They'd talked a lot in recent months, of course they had, and shared an _I love you_ at least once a day, like clockwork, but they hadn't broached _that_.

She jumped a mile at the rustling sound behind her, flustered at the thought of being caught in the midst of such thoughts by her young daughter, and felt her cheeks heat immediately. Distracted by her embarrassment, she missed her footing on the icy rock and teetered forwards, arms flailing, sketchbook flung away into nothingness.

Her cheeks cooled down rather abruptly when she fell straight through the ice and into the freezing water below.

…...

Raven enjoyed having someone intelligent around the place, she decided, as she and Emori found themselves engaged in a rather cheerful and completely pointless early morning debate about how, exactly, they might fix the door to the viewing platform on Deck C without wasting any of their precious stock of scrap metal. No one had actually shown any interest in visiting the viewing platform on Deck C, but they could both agree on one thing: there was nothing they liked better than an utterly unnecessary project.

She hoped that their early morning Earth-monitoring brainstorming sessions would not disappear when that much-anticipated baby appeared.

"You're so narrow-minded." Her friend told her with spirit and a broad smile. "Get out of your mechanic-sized box and think about -"

She was interrupted by a panicked voice on the radio.

"Hello? Hello? Is anyone there? It's Madi. Please. I need Bellamy." Raven felt the air rush out of her lungs as she reached for the handset.

"Madi? It's Raven here. What's wrong?"

"It's Clarke. She fell in the river and now she won't wake up. Please, I need Bellamy."

At that, Emori made for the door but Raven moved to intercept her even while the girl carried on babbling in distress in the background.

"What are you doing? I need to go fetch Bellamy." Emori looked ready to push her clean out of the way as she reacted to the crisis.

"Don't. He'll only panic. Let's find out what's going on first."

"Raven. Get out of my way. The woman he loves _won't wake up_. I think he has a right to be here." At that, she stormed straight past her and out of the door, before Raven even had chance to acknowledge that, perhaps, she might have a point. Loving relationships were, apparently, still not her best thing.

"OK, Madi." She got back on the radio. "Tell me what happened."

"Clarke fell in the river and it's frozen and I managed to get her out and drag her back here but she won't wake up."

"OK, Madi. It'll be OK. Is she breathing?"

"Yeah, she's breathing but that's all. She's not moving or anything."

"OK, but she's breathing, that's really good news. Do you know if she hit her head?"

"I think she did. There's a bit of blood and she has a big bruise round her eye."

"OK. And the river's very cold? Is she soaked through?"

"She was. I got her wet clothes off and she's wrapped in blankets and she's next to the stove."

"You've done great, Madi. You've done all the right things. And you were right to call us."

"I just want her to wake up. And I want Bellamy."

"He'll be here soon, I promise. You just sit with Clarke and keep her warm and keep talking to me."

"What do I do if she dies, Raven? I don't want to be on my own."

"She's going to be OK, kid. And you'll never be on your own, we're all here for you too."

Right on cue, Bellamy burst through the door, half dressed and breathless from running.

"Is she – what's – how?" He panted incoherently as he crossed the room.

"She's alive. You'd better take a few deep breaths before you speak to Madi or you'll panic her even more."

"What happened?"

"Hypothermia and a knock to the head. It sounds like it's probably not as serious as it could have been."

"Thank goodness." He visibly crumpled with relief and she noted gratefully that Emori at least had the presence of mind in a crisis to offer him a chair. "What did -?"

"Raven?" Madi's voice piped over the radio, and she realised that she must have missed something from the girl in all the noise of Bellamy's arrival.

"I'm still here. And Bellamy's just got here, I'll pass you over."

She might not have been the most tactful woman in the universe, or even on this space station, but even Raven Reyes realised this was a good moment to leave the room.

…...

Bellamy had faced some pretty frightening things in his life, but the realisation that the woman he loved was unconscious and hypothermic several thousand miles away, and he was unable to do anything at all about the situation, was, he thought, easily the scariest of the lot.

He forced himself to take some deep breaths and at least _pretend _to be calm, for Madi's sake.

"Madi?"

"Bellamy!" With that, his daughter burst abruptly into tears. And if he'd thought long-distance parenting was challenging before, that paled into insignificance beside his vague attempts to make comforting noises over the radio while his little girl wept at her unconscious mother's side.

He just wanted to get back to Earth. Soon, preferably, and in one piece, to be reunited with his family.

"It'll be OK, Madi." He soothed as she grew a little quieter. "Just make sure she stays warm, and keep talking to me. What happened, anyway?"

"She fell in the river. I surprised her and she jumped and slipped and fell in." Madi sounded inconsolable at the idea that she had somehow caused this.

"Hey, it's not your fault, kid. It was an accident. And Clarke will tell you the same thing just as soon as she wakes up." She had to wake up. She _had _to.

"I hope so. She just went out to draw and I wanted to join her and I didn't mean to scare her. And I think she dropped her sketchbook, too, and I don't want her to be angry with me."

"Don't worry, Madi. I think a lost sketchbook is not the end of the world just now. She'll be really proud of you for looking after her so well."

"You think?" She asked quietly, and Bellamy could have sworn he heard a groaning noise in the background. Maybe it was just some cruel optimistic streak in his mind playing tricks on him.

"Yeah. Madi, did I just hear a noise?" There it was again.

"Yeah. It's Clarke. Why is she making those noises? Is she sick? Is she hurt?"

"It's OK, Madi. It's a good sign. It probably means she's waking up."

"You think?"

"Yeah." He knew it was at least a little crazy, but he started speaking to her all the same. He'd always been a little crazy where Clarke was concerned. "Clarke, can you hear me? Please tell me you're OK."

"Bellamy?" He wasn't crying with relief. Not at all. His eyes were just a little moist.

"Clarke. Thank god. You had us worried there." He sighed into the radio even as he could hear Madi babbling excitedly in the background.

Clarke let out another loud groan.

"You OK? What's wrong?"

"My head hurts." He heard her splutter as if clearing her throat. "A lot."

"Oh, sorry. We should probably stop talking at you so loudly. Just – yeah – relief." He finished less than eloquently.

She let out a slightly stilted chuckle. "I'm sorry for giving you a fright."

"It's hardly your fault."

"I don't know. Pretty sure it is my fault that I was an idiot and got distracted and then accidentally jumped into a river."

"What distracted you?" He asked, presuming she meant that some wild animal had given her a fright or something.

There was a beat of silence before she responded. "Missing you."

"Clarke." He was aware even as it was happening that _groaning _her name was probably not attractive, but seemed powerless to stop it. "I'm going to be there before you know it. And we can be a proper family and... and that brother or sister for Madi that we talked about once? I'm looking forward to that bit especially. I'm sure they'll be just as beautiful as their mother."

"I don't feel very beautiful right now." She whispered. "I'm pretty sure I have a black eye from hitting my face on something. Certainly feels like it."

"Pretty sure you're still the most beautiful woman on Earth." He told her warmly.

"Nice compliment to pay the only grown woman currently technically on Earth." She said, tone light, but he couldn't help feeling their was something else lying beneath her flippant response. He wondered what was going on in her head while she was down there almost alone and decided a bit of heartfelt honesty was in order.

"Clarke. I'm pretty sure I'll always think you're stunning, no matter how recently you've fallen in a river. But I'd rather you didn't fall in rivers too often, because I love you, and it scares me when I can't hear your voice."

"I love you too." He heard her suck in a slow breath, as if putting off the question she was about to ask. "What are we, Bellamy?"

"What do you mean?"

"I mean... our relationship. What are we?"

He sighed, long and low, and reminded himself that he couldn't know what it was like to be down there, all alone but for the company of a small child. He had no way of understanding quite how isolated and insecure she must be feeling.

All the same, it seemed like a damn idiotic question, and he wasn't used to Clarke Griffin being an idiot.

"We're Madi's parents." He began slowly, deliberately, wanting to be absolutely clear. "We're also going to be the parents of Madi's siblings, so use your imagination to understand how that's going to work – and yes, I'm looking forward to that bit of the process quite a lot. But, above all, we're a team, aren't we? Or at least, I always thought we were. Partners, in every sense of the word."

"Partners. Yeah, OK. That sounds about right."

"Clarke?"

"Yeah?"

"Will you be my long-distance date to Murphy's party?"

She laughed at that, and the sound warmed his soul. She had not drowned, nor died of hypothermia, and she was laughing at his lame jokes again.

"I would be honoured."

…...

Emori had grown used to the concept of a miserable breakfast table over the last couple of years, but that morning's had been, she decided easily, an all-time low. So it was that, as soon as Bellamy had returned, looking troubled but no longer entirely _frantic_, and told them Clarke was well, she had resolved that they all needed to get on with happier things.

This party was going to be the best night of John's life.

She told him that as they were setting up the music system and waiting for Monty to appear with the moonshine and the rest of the crew to show up with – well, with whatever it was they were contributing. Company. Friendship. Family. All those kinds of things the pair of them were still getting the hang of.

"The best night of my life? I'd like to see you try."

"No need to be so sarcastic about it, John." She snapped, fed up of his propensity to shoot down everything that was _nice _in the world. Or even in space.

"If you'd let me finish you'd realise there was going to be a compliment in there."

"There was?" She asked, at least a little incredulous, because compliments were, in her experience, not a very _John Murphy_ thing.

"Yeah. I was going to say that nothing could beat the evening of the day you told me you were pregnant."

She felt tears springing up at that, and reminded herself that high emotions were a natural part of pregnancy. It was obviously nothing to do with the fact that she'd just been witness to what was, without doubt, the sweetest thing her distinctly _un_-sweet boyfriend had ever said.

"OK, then. But it's still going to be pretty great."

And it was.

Raven hit the moonshine perhaps the hardest of all of them, and started saying various unexpectedly sappy things about how much she was looking forward to being an aunt. But Echo, too, more than pulled her weight on the drinking front and before she could quite work out how it had happened, the pair of them were playing some game that involved flipping small pieces of metal into cups. It was remarkable, she noted, how much Echo had come out of her shell since John and Bellamy had first invited her to join their sparring sessions.

Clarke's radio calls had made a lot of difference to all of them, it would seem.

Even Monty and Harper were rather more outgoing than usual, less wrapped up in each other and more inclined to include the rest of the world in their conversations, such as their current discussion with John and Clarke about the farm. She had never thought she would see the day when John was inviting Monty to tell him _more _about his algae production. Nor, for that matter, had she expected to see her friends quite so enthusiastic about what their designated chef was calling _algae crackers_, not after Raven's previous insistence that algae snacks did not make a good party.

Only Bellamy continued to look distinctly troubled, she thought. And probably, she decided, that was not unrelated to the fact that Clarke had fallen into a river only that morning, but really, as she now seemed to be right as rain it wasn't clear why he was still frowning all over the place. It killed the mood a bit, she felt. But beyond that, she was also worrying about him, and wondering whether perhaps something was wrong between him and Clarke. Had he made some ill-thought-out declaration of love while she was on her sickbed, only to be rebuffed? It hardly seemed likely. She didn't know Clarke well, but one thing she did know was that she was devoted to him.

She decided that she ought to practise this family thing a bit and ask him what was wrong. Apart from anything else, she was certainly the only person sober enough to be a stable source of emotional support just now.

"Bellamy? Are you alright?"

"What? Yeah." She was less than convinced as he continued to stare at the radio with a distinctly _bothered_ crease to his brow. "Yeah. Great party."

"Thanks. Is Clarke doing OK? You said she was fine from her fall this morning."

"Yeah. Yeah, it's not the fall." He continued to stare at the radio, and she thought maybe that was it, maybe they weren't quite on _sharing and caring _terms yet.

She sipped her cup of water for something to do. After all, she didn't have anywhere else to be.

At length he started to talk into the empty space in front of him, eyes averted from hers.

"I'm worried about Clarke." He murmured, as if not sure he was allowed to admit that. As if he thought he was supposed to pretend that everything was perfect, now that the radio was working.

"You are?"

"Yeah. She's – I don't know. She seems low. And lonely. And insecure. And I know she's still upset over what she found at Arkadia. And I'm thousands of miles away and I can't fix it." He punched a closed fist into his palm in frustration. "I just want her to be OK."

"That's understandable. I can see why you're frustrated. But Bellamy, you're doing everything you can."

"I should be doing more."

"I'm not sure there's any more you could do." She frowned a little, and wondered how the words that were gathering on the tip of her tongue would be received. "I'd like to talk to her more. I know that sounds stupid, we've never been close. But - she's been so kind and helpful about the baby. And you did say she was lonely. Maybe... I know the two of you are great together, but maybe it would be good if the rest of us were in her life more, too? If it wasn't always only you and her and Madi."

"I do think she'd like that. She asks after everyone else all the time but... she doesn't like to bother you. She'll only talk to Raven if she's got an engineering question. It's like she thinks she needs an excuse for people to want to speak to her."

"She needs to remember we're all family, now."

"Yeah. I think she still feels guilty for everything she's done to wrong you all, in the past."

"That's stupid. She's done worse to you than to any of us, and she understands that you've forgiven her."

"Yes. But she knows I'm in love with her." He pointed out with a chuckle. "Thanks, Emori. Really. Your kid is going to be lucky to have such a sensible mum."

"Flatterer." She laughed. "Look, go enjoy the party. I'm sure you could teach Raven a thing or two about that stupid cup game. I'm going to go accidentally join in the conversation with my friend Clarke."

"You're too tactful to be dating John Murphy."

"What can I say? He makes up for it." She threw over her shoulder as she made her way to the radio, leaving Bellamy looking at least a little horrified at her insinuation.

**a/n Thanks for reading!**


	15. Chapter 15

**a/n Thank you, fabulous people who reviewed that last chapter. I find it harder to update this story than my others, so your encouragement really means a lot to me. Here we have Emori getting jittery about the approaching birth, and a cheerful dose of Bellarke fluff. Happy reading!**

Emori was getting nervous, now, she didn't mind admitting it. Somewhere between six and seven months pregnant, and somewhere between the size of a horse and the size of a pauna – at least, that was how it _felt_ – she found herself realising, rather abruptly, that she was going to be giving birth before too long.

There were various ways she could approach this nervousness, she figured. She could sit alone in bed and stew, and wait for John to get worried about her in his turn and then, before long, the whole Ring would be anxious. So that hardly sounded like a good idea. She could help Raven with her pointless mission to fix the door to the viewing platform on Deck C, but procrastinatory engineering didn't sound like the most productive way of dealing with her concerns.

The answer was obvious, really. She should call Clarke.

She'd become somewhat closer to Clarke in recent weeks, and not just because she was the closest thing she was going to find to a doctor to see her through this pregnancy. She supposed it had all started with that day in Becca's lab when Clarke had decided to inject herself with the nightblood, rather than Emori. It was difficult, somehow, _not_ to become friends with her, after that, now that the opportunity had presented itself. And if Emori knew, from what Bellamy had said at John's party, that a bit of friendship would be appreciated by Clarke, too, at this point – well, then. That was all to the good. Everyone was, for once in this life, a winner.

She set down the tablet she had been ignoring, on which she was supposed to have been reading some long-outdated text about what to expect from motherhood, and headed to the radio.

"Clarke? You there?"

There was a brief pause, then a bit of a scuffling sound, then a worried voice.

"Emori. Hey. Is there a problem?"

"Not really." She rushed to assure her, cursing the fact that she hadn't realised Clarke would jump to that conclusion if she called in the middle of the morning. "I just wanted to chat, if you've got a moment."

"Sure. Of course I have. I'm just about to take Madi hunting but we have a minute."

"Thanks."

"How's things?"

"Not bad." She began carefully, wondering how to go about explaining herself. "I guess I'm a bit nervous."

"About the baby, you mean? That's understandable."

"Yeah."

"Any particular part of it I can help you with?"

"I don't know, really. It's just – there's a lot to think about. And I don't know how to do any of it. And it's a bit overwhelming, really." Emori admitted carefully. She wasn't used to being overwhelmed, let alone admitting to it, but she supposed she was only going to get help if she asked for it.

"That's OK, Emori. I can see it would be. Let's think of some ways to break it down a bit into smaller parts that we can work on."

"Have I told you that you're the best pregnancy doctor I've ever had?"

Clarke laughed aloud at that. "Thanks. And I think that's the best compliment I've had all week."

"I'll tell Bellamy you said that."

"Please do." Another burst of laughter. "So, let's decide where to start. Have you thought about the setup for the actual birth? Where you'll be, and who will be with you? I recommend Bellamy, seeing as he's the only person with you who's ever actually helped with a birth before."

"Because having my friend's boyfriend watching me give birth isn't going to be at all weird."

"You're sounding more and more like John, you know."

"He is a bad influence, isn't he? This little one is so screwed." Emori found herself giggling for, she reckoned, the first time that day. "OK, so next I need to work out where I'm giving birth, and get that ready, and choose who I want to have with me. I can deal with that. Thank you."

"No problem."

"I'm going to go tell John he needs to do something useful, then. Speak to you later."

"Bye. Good luck!"

Yes. Calling Clarke had very much been the right answer.

…...

If there was one thing Raven was looking forward to about their eventual return to Earth, it was getting to eat some decent food again.

She was looking forward to seeing Clarke again, of course. And Abby. Friendship, and all that.

But, yes, she couldn't really have been more sick of algae if she tried. With a mournful sigh she stirred her lunch and waited for something, anything, to distract her from the fact that she was actually eating green goop. Hopefully, she mused, the conversation would be decent at this particular mealtime.

"Do you think we could paint the walls with this stuff?" That was Murphy. Well, then. So much for decent conversation.

"Why would we want to?" Bellamy asked, confused. "I don't want green walls."

"Might be something to do." Murphy shrugged. "Maybe my kid likes green."

"_Our_ kid needs us to focus on more important things than redecorating." Perhaps, Raven hoped, Emori might be about to bring the discussion back to something rather more sane. "We need to start making arrangements for the birth."

That shut Murphy up promptly enough, as he started choking on a spoonful of algae, visibly alarmed.

"The – the birth?"

"Yes, John. That's the thing that happens between pregnancy and raising a child."

"Yeah. Of course." He swallowed, carefully. "So what do we need to do?"

"I need to decide where I'm having the baby, and who's going to be in there with me. If it's OK, Bellamy, I'd like you to be there? I guess I should ask you as you're the only person here who's ever delivered a baby before."

"Sure." Bellamy agreed with that easy smile he had been wearing rather a lot of late. "I'll ask Clarke for some tips."

"He's not." Echo said, so quietly that Raven almost did not hear her.

"What?" It was Murphy, of course, who asked. "What do you mean, he's not?"

"He's not the only person here who's ever delivered a baby." Echo clarified with infinite calm. "My mother had a younger child, just before I left to train with Queen Nia. My brother, and I helped deliver him. He's dead now. They both are."

"I'm so sorry." It was Harper who got there first. "I never knew."

"Why should you? I never told you." Even Raven found herself blinking rather rapidly at that. But not crying, of course, because she wasn't in the habit of crying over the dead relatives of people she was less than close to.

"Echo, I'd be honoured if you'd be there, too." Emori asked, apparently apprehensive.

"If you want me there, I'll be there." Echo agreed with a nod and an expression which was almost warm.

"And Raven, obviously. And Harper. Got to have all the aunts there."

"I hope I'm invited to this occasion?" Murphy asked, sarcasm doing a poor job of masking his genuine anxiety.

"Obviously." Emori scoffed, giving him a peck on the cheek for his trouble.

"Great stuff, guys." Monty piped up, from his seat at the end of the table, and Raven realised that she had rather forgotten he was there. "So I guess I'll just hover outside this delivery room alone."

Emori laughed at that, not unkindly. "You know what, Monty? I think you should be there as well. Let's just have the whole family invited."

"Sounds like a rave." Murphy muttered into his algae bowl.

Raven wasn't convinced that this would have all of the stereotypical features of a _rave_. She suspected that there would be screaming, sure, but not of the overexcited partying kind. And she was expecting the moonshine to be in use more for sterilising hands than soaking stomachs. And, really, all things considered, she thought that probably, the excitement of the birth would be tinged with quite a lot of concern.

But it couldn't be denied – she was looking forward to it all the same.

…...

Bellamy still hadn't learnt the art of patience when it came to waiting for his evening radio call with Clarke. He'd had a good few months, now, to work on it, to adjust to the idea that she wasn't going anywhere, yet he was fantastically poor at passing each day without counting down the seconds until he could hear her voice again.

He'd been working on the art of doing other things at the same time as that, of course. He could now speak passable Trig, and could give Echo a decent match in grounder-style hand-to-hand combat, and could recite from memory half the books on the Ring. But day in, day out, during these worthy activities and beneficial lessons, he continued to wait impatiently for his next chance to get to the radio.

It wasn't just Clarke, of course. He was growing increasingly attached to Madi, as well, and their odd long-distance family life was falling into something of a comfortable routine with each day that passed. And the next step of the routine, as he bolted his supper and half-jogged to Earth Monitoring, was to ask after his foster-daughter's day and tell her a bedtime story.

"Madi? Are you there?"

Barely seconds passed before he heard the reply. "I'm here! I'm here. But I'm still doing chores so can we try again in ten minutes?"

"Sure we can, kid." He went to put down the handset. There must be something in this place, he thought, worth reading for ten minutes.

"No, hang on." Madi piped up again. "Clarke says I can speak to you while she does the chores, as a treat."

"Does she? Are you sure about that? I wouldn't want you to be telling me a little lie to get out of your chores."

Clarke's laughing voice came over the radio at that. "It's fine, Bellamy. You two have story time and I'll do the dishes. Madi's got a bit of a surprise for you today, she's been excited about it all afternoon. I'll speak to you when she's done."

That, he thought, sounded intriguing. "Great. What's the surprise, then, Madi?"

"I want to tell _you_ a story, today, Bellamy. I'm going to tell you the story of the hunting trip we went on in the snow this morning."

"That sounds great. I can't wait."

He sat back into his chair, and listened with unfeigned enthusiasm to the tale of his two favourite people going on what was, by all accounts, a deeply exciting adventure through winter weather in pursuit of a deer which had – shocking development – only one head. It wasn't, perhaps, actually the most interesting story he'd ever heard, but hearing Madi's evident delight, and laughing at her childish attempts to impersonate Clarke, and imagining himself actually by their sides through her detailed description, had him genuinely enthralled by the tale.

At length, Madi finished her account. The deer was slain, and hauled back to their home, and it seemed that they had spent the afternoon dismembering and preserving the carcass.

"And they all lived happily ever after, the end." She concluded brightly.

"I'm not sure about that, kid. It sounds like the deer didn't live happily ever after."

"Please, Bellamy, do not upset her." Clarke's voice joined the conversation. "She'll never eat venison again if you carry on like that."

"Will too. Deer don't look as cute as bears." Madi argued straight back, and he found himself rather distressed to learn that this little girl he felt responsible for thought that dangerous carnivores were _cute_. "I'm going to bed, now, Bellamy. Night night. Can we have Achilles for the story tomorrow?"

"Sure we can, Madi. Goodnight. Sleep well."

There was a moment's silence, during the course of which Clarke presumably said goodbye to Madi several thousand miles away, and then he heard her familiar voice once more.

"Have I ever told you that you're ridiculously good with children?"

"You may have mentioned it once or twice." He chuckled. "It's just as well. Apparently I'm chief midwife when Emori gives birth."

"Yeah. Sorry, I think I set you up for that one."

"No worries. It can't be the most frightening thing I've ever done."

"What is, do you think?" She asked thoughtfully.

"Huh?"

"What is the most frightening thing you've ever done?"

He gave a rather empty laugh. "God knows. I lose track. Arriving here without you and realising I was supposed to somehow survive that? Leaving O in that bunker? Going home to that empty apartment the night they arrested my mum?"

"Sorry." She sounded a bit sheepish. "That was a stupid question. I didn't mean to upset you."

"Hey, it's OK. There are no stupid questions between us." He reassured her, meaning every word. He wanted to know everything about this woman, and he wanted her to feel she had permission to ask him about anything in her turn.

"OK, then. What's your favourite food?"

"Now that is unfair. How can you ask me that when I'm stuck on algae for the next three years?"

"So you're saying that _is_ a stupid question."

"I'm saying it's a bit cruel, but you're forgiven. Probably apples, I think."

"Apples? You've got the choice of anything and you go for _apples_?"

"I like apples." He shrugged, then realised she couldn't see it. Ah well. Knowing her, she could probably _hear_ it, somehow, in the tone of his voice. "They're practical but they taste good. What would you pick?"

"Not fish." He could practically hear her wrinkling her nose in disgust. "We eat too much fish here. It was a relief to get that deer today."

"I can understand that." He took a careful breath, wondered how to go about saying exactly what was on his mind. "Clarke?"

"Yeah?"

"Thank you for asking me a stupid question."

"You're welcome." That was definitely her confused voice, he thought.

"It's just – when we were on the ground, it felt like we were always trying to solve a problem or fight to survive. It sucks that you're so far away, and I can't show you everything that you mean to me but – it's so great to have this time just to get to know you, if that makes sense." He finished, bit his lip, and waited for her to tell him he was being a bit of an idiot.

"I know exactly what you mean." She exceeded his expectations, as always. "It feels like we did it backwards, doesn't it? I fell in love with you before I really knew you."

"I knew the important stuff." He argued firmly. "I knew that you're brave, and kind, and all the stuff that really matters. We've got the rest of our lives to learn each other's favourite foods."

"And the rest of our lives for you to _show me everything that I mean to you_." She teased. "I wonder what you meant by that, exactly?"

"You know exactly what I meant." He reprimanded her affectionately, because, actually, she always did know exactly what he meant. "You annoyingly beautiful woman."

"Was that a compliment?"

"It was." He confirmed easily. "But apparently not a very good one."

"It was good enough for me." She was fighting giggles, he could tell. "I'm going to go to bed, now, Bellamy. Dragging that deer around was exhausting. Speak for a bit longer tomorrow?"

"Sure. I'll prepare a list of stupid questions."

"Me, too."

There was a pause, and he wondered if he was supposed to fill it, perhaps by saying goodbye or wishing her a quiet night's sleep.

"Bellamy?"

"Yeah?"

"Can I ask you another stupid question?"

This was an odd development, he thought. She was supposed to be going to bed, but she was still asking about asking stupid questions, rather more nervously than she had been only moments ago, and he couldn't quite work out why.

"Sure."

"What do you think our first kiss will be like?"

He felt the air rush out of his lungs, wondered whether there was any such thing as a good answer to that. Wondered how to go about telling her that he didn't actually _care_, so long as he was kissing her, without sounding like he was belittling her evident concern.

"I don't know." He told her honestly, in the end. "But I know that I love you, and I know that it'll be great because you're _you_."

"I don't want you to be disappointed. After all this waiting, what if it's not as great as you imagined? What if – what if you're not attracted to me, after so long apart?" He'd been worrying about that, too, actually, but the other way around. And the more he thought about it, the more he decided that it was stupid. And the more he thought about _that_ – well, then. The more he thought she needed to know what was going on in his head, too.

"Clarke. Believe me when I say that I'm a bit more in love with you than that." He gathered his wits, prepared to tell her that difficult truth. "I've been worrying about that, too, though. What if I'm not how you remember me? I didn't always take good care of myself at first, up here. What if I don't get back in shape again, like I was when we first met?"

"I'm a bit more in love with you than that, too." She murmured, and he felt his heart do something of a victory dance inside his chest. "Shall we try to stop worrying about that, then?"

"I would." He agreed easily. "That seems like the sensible choice, and I know you like sensible choices. Get some sleep."

"Yeah. Sweet dreams."

"You too. And, Clarke?"

"Yeah?"

"I'm looking forward to that kiss."

**a/n Thanks for reading!**


	16. Chapter 16

**a/n Thank you so much to the people who left reviews on that last chapter! I'm so excited that there are people who enjoy this story and want to keep reading it - I shall do my best to keep writing it. Your encouragement has definitely given my enthusiasm for writing this a new lease of life. Happy reading!**

Bellamy tried very hard to concentrate on the task before him. He was supposed to be making a crib for the much-anticipated baby, of all things, despite his protestations that a career as a cadet, a janitor, and a coordinator of teenage delinquents did not exactly leave him qualified in carpentry. And incompetence wasn't even the biggest problem, here, if he was being honest. No, the biggest problem was quite how distracted he found himself by thoughts of Clarke.

He often found himself distracted by thoughts of Clarke. For the most part, they were reasonably innocent thoughts, about what she might be up to, and how her day was going. Sometimes they were just a little more personal, thoughts of the curve of her lips, or how it felt to enfold her in a hug.

But with increasing frequency, since that question she'd asked him about the kiss a couple of weeks ago, he found himself distracted by thoughts of Clarke that were rather less innocent. It was a special kind of sweet torture, he thought, to be so physically distant from her at the start of this new relationship that had been so many years in the making. He wasn't quite sure how he was going to last three and a half years without feeling the warmth of her skin beneath his fingertips.

No, only three years and a month, now. That had to count as progress.

He sighed deeply, and tried to convince himself to refocus on the task before him. He wouldn't want the newest member of their extended family to be without a crib when they arrived. And he wouldn't want the newly _driven_ John Murphy to kick him in the guts for letting the side down. He hammered a nail into place with no great enthusiasm, and wondered when it was that he had become Raven's dogsbody. He seemed to remember that he had been considered a leader, of sorts, once upon a time.

He jumped, startled, when a voice drifted through the open door.

"Bellamy?" Thank goodness. That was Echo, and hopefully she could provide him an excuse for giving up on this project, at least temporarily.

"Hey." He got to his feet as she appeared on the threshold. "What's up?"

"We need to go beat up Murphy. He's bugging Emori."

"I'm hoping that you mean we need to go _train with_ Murphy?"

"Isn't that what I said?" She asked with a laugh. It had taken him a while to adjust to Echo's sense of humour, he had to admit, but he liked to think he was getting there, now.

"Something like that." He dusted his hands off and the two of them set out towards their improvised gym. "What's he been doing?"

"The usual. Following her round. Asking if she's OK several times an hour."

Bellamy found himself grinning. "I think I'd be as bad, to be honest, if it was Clarke."

Suddenly it seemed Echo was looking at him as if he had lost his mind. "You _are_ as bad about Clarke, and she's neither here nor pregnant."

"What do you mean?"

"You are at least as obsessed with whether she and Madi are OK as Murphy is with Emori. Even when you're not on the radio we can all tell you're thinking about them."

He supposed that might be true, actually. "Can you blame me? I spent all that time thinking she was dead."

"None of us blame you at all." She assured him, with a sort of fleeting half a hug that felt a lot like an attempt at friendship. "Now come on. Let's go give Murphy a hard time."

…...

Murphy had to admit that he might, in fact, have been starting, just ever so slightly, to lose the plot.

OK. That was a lie. He had lost the plot a couple of months ago. Now, he was in serious danger of losing his head completely. But, really, he didn't think anyone could blame him for that. It wasn't exactly an everyday occurrence, to end up accidentally becoming a father, at the age of twenty, whilst living in a tin can floating above a burning planet. And he couldn't help panicking rather a lot at the idea that he was supposed to be parenting a small child, in the imminent future, when he knew precious little about parenting.

He knew that this panic hadn't passed unnoticed by his sickeningly chirpy new _family_, as the crew of said tin can seemed to have started calling themselves since the news of Emori's pregnancy got out. It couldn't be a coincidence, surely, that Bellamy and Harper and Echo kept finding themselves in need of a training buddy, and Monty kept finding himself in need of an extra pair of hands on the algae farm, and Raven and Emori kept finding themselves in need of someone to run errands. It had not escaped his notice that those errands always seemed to be trivial and long-winded in nature, and mostly revolved around fetching something small, obscure, and evidently useless from some distant part of the Ring.

He supposed he ought to feel supported by all these attempts to keep him calm and distracted and useful, but he had to admit that he was also finding them a little patronising.

He stifled a sigh, and wandered into what passed for a common room on this space station, and sagged into an uncomfortable chair that was, he suspected, an Old Earth antique.

"You OK?" He jumped a little at the sound of Monty's voice, not having expected to find anyone else here. Emori had gone to bed early, of course, and Bellamy was likely on the radio, and he had to admit that he wasn't entirely sure what the rest of his neighbours tended to get up to in the evenings. He just knew it didn't generally involve him.

"Yeah." He lied cheerfully, with a careful shrug. "Just thought that I should leave Emori to get some rest. Thought I might play cards or something."

"You thought you might play cards alone?" Monty asked, a little incredulous.

"Never heard of Solitaire?" He bit back, disproportionately annoyed to be called out on being a lonely loser.

"You're a month away from fatherhood and you're spending your evening playing Solitaire?"

"What's wrong with that?"

"Nothing's wrong with it." Monty said, surprisingly calm despite his own rising anger. "I just wondered if you'd prefer some company. Or to chat about the baby, or whatever."

If he wasn't John Murphy, he thought he might actually have felt _touched_ at that. "No, it's OK. I get that everyone else has other things they'd rather be doing."

"I don't have anything to do, as it happens." Monty informed him conversationally. "Harper and Raven decided that Echo needed to learn about the concept of a Skaikru _girls' night_, and Bellamy's obviously with Clarke. So if you did want some company, I don't have much else on."

He remembered, with those words, why he didn't used to like Monty. The old, pre-fatherhood Murphy used to find it a bit annoying that this guy was so infuriatingly good and kind all the time, he recalled.

But he remembered, too, that he was practising doing a little better, these days. That he was hoping to become the kind of father Alex Murphy had been.

"D'you think it's normal to be a bit worried about having a kid?" He asked, concentrating carefully on shuffling a deck of cards. He did come here to play Solitaire, after all.

"Of course it is." Monty shrugged. "It's just because you want to do a great job of it."

"I'm not sure I know how to. I didn't have a dad for very long."

"I don't think that matters. From what you've said, he was a great example while he was around." Monty paused for a moment, a thoughtful frown on his face. "My father was great, and he was there right up until I went to lock up, and I could always rely on him. But I'm pretty sure I'd still be nervous if I was about to have a kid."

"Yeah. It's weird. I always thought that – having kids was something that happened to other people. Older, more respectable people, who had their shit together."

Monty laughed at that, loud and long. "Murphy. I never thought I'd say this, but I think you and Emori have your shit together better than any of the rest of us."

The worrying thing was, Murphy thought that might just be the truth.

…...

Clarke had enjoyed today more than most. There had been decent weather, and a sense that spring was coming. There had been, too, rabbit for supper, and anything that wasn't fish was basically a victory as far as she was concerned. And then Bellamy had called, right on schedule, and told Madi some really quite insensitively bloodthirsty bedtime story about a duel between heroes who were now long dead - if indeed they had ever existed at all – and Clarke had his undivided attention for the rest of the evening.

Overall, she was starting to think that she might survive the next three years and twenty-six days. Not that she was counting, or anything.

Who did she think she was kidding? Of course she was counting the days. There were some nights when it was all she could do not to count the _seconds_.

"How was your day?" Bellamy asked her now, as she waved Madi off to bed and settled into her favourite chair.

"Pretty good, actually. I'm really starting to believe that I'll make it to your landing day without completely losing my mind."

"Yeah. I realised today that it's nearly six months since you got in touch and it's flown by so quickly. Or quicker than when I thought you were dead, anyway." She hated the sorrow she could still hear in his voice every time he so much as thought about those long months.

"I owe Raven for fixing that radio." She told him, trying to inject a bit of levity back into the conversation.

"I don't think you do, not any more." He disagreed with a laugh. "She's had me making this damn crib for the baby. I don't think we owe her anything after that."

She tried not to be too touched at the idea he reckoned their debts were shared, now. "And how's that going?"

"Badly. I'm no good at woodwork and you keep distracting me."

"I'm sorry." She giggled, not really sorry at all. "I take it that's another veiled compliment?"

"Of course." She could hear him chuckling too. "It's so good to speak to you, Clarke. I mean, I know we do this every day but – I just needed to tell you that."

"I get that." She murmured, hoping he could hear the caress in her voice. "It's always good to speak to you, too. Is it your turn to ask a stupid question, today?"

"Yeah." He paused, and she could practically hear his hesitant frown. It looked like today's stupid question might be an uncomfortable one, then.

"Whatever it is, you know you can ask me." She reminded him gently.

"OK then. Here goes. If – if you were at the gates, on the way home from Mount Weather, all over again, would you still leave? I know that probably sounds stupid. I just wondered – if you got another chance, would you choose differently?"

She sighed deeply. She had to admit, she had wondered when they would talk about this. And she supposed that she ought to have spent a little time, in the last couple of years when she'd had precious little else to think about, planning what her response to a question like this might be. But she hadn't done that, and so it seemed she would have to make do.

"Honestly, Bellamy, if I was in _exactly_ the same situation all over again, I think I would have left every time. That was just – it was the only option I could see, back then. But if I found myself in a situation like that, _now_, with the benefit of hindsight, and knowing that you'd be there with me, I'd choose differently. Does that make sense? That I couldn't have chosen any differently back then, but I'd choose differently now?"

He was silent for a little too long. "Yeah. I guess."

"What is it? You don't sound very happy with that answer."

She heard a noise in the background that sounded suspiciously like someone kicking a heavy article of furniture. "I'm not."

"I'm sorry. I was trying to be honest."

"No, I'm not unhappy with _you_. I just – I'll always blame myself for not being enough to make you want to stay. And not making you feel like I'd be there for you if you did stay."

"Honestly, Bellamy, it was nothing to do with you. That may sound harsh, but it was to do with me, and Lexa, and all those deaths. There was nothing you could have done about it."

"You mean that?"

"I'm sorry you've spent all this time blaming yourself."

"I'm sorry we've never talked about it before."

"Good job we've got the next three years to do nothing but talk." She said, trying to sound upbeat.

"Speak for yourself." He said, matching her cheerful tone. "I'm going to be practising my crib-making. I'm telling you, when I get back and we give Madi that little brother or sister, they are going to sleep in style."

She laughed a little, and wished there was a way to reach out through the radio and kiss him senseless. "I love you."

"I love you, too." He told her, sounding bemused. "But you really do say that at the strangest moments."

**a/n Thanks for reading!**


	17. Chapter 17

**a/n Thank you to those of you who reviewed the last chapter! I'm so pleased I picked this story up again, I'm having a great time writing it. One little spoiler for season six ahead. Happy reading!**

Echo had never expected to be the type of woman who went to a _Skaikru girls' night_. Apart from anything else, she'd always rather disdained opportunities to socialise with other young women, on the ground, and she'd rather hated Skaikru until she'd ended up in a tube in the sky with them. Or maybe until a couple of months after that, if she was being truly honest with herself.

And yet, somehow, this was the third time in as many weeks that she had found herself appearing at Raven's room for an evening of having fun doing nothing in particular.

She didn't quite understand how it was that these gatherings constituted a _girls' night_. They happened in the evenings, of course, and consisted entirely of young women, but she didn't understand what was so special about this particular type of organised fun. They didn't even tend to drink, out of consideration for the fact that Emori wouldn't have been able to join them in doing so. They just sort of sat around, with a film on in the background that they largely ignored while they were chatting.

The idea that _chatting_ was something that Echo enjoyed was a new development, too. She'd not exactly had friends, when she was younger, not since she'd killed the real Echo who had been just about her only childhood companion. But since she'd ended up in this damn tin can she seemed to be getting on better with other people. She'd hit it off easily with Emori, of course, because they both understood what it felt like to be cast out. And Emori and Raven had quickly become a package deal, so that sorted that one out. And she'd always respected Bellamy, and she enjoyed training with him and Murphy and Harper.

She had to admit, though, that Monty continued to be something of a mystery to her.

She expressed this opinion to Harper, now. She reckoned that was how gossip was supposed to work.

"He's still a mystery to me." Harper agreed with a laugh. "And I've been dating him for the last couple of years."

"No." Raven, naturally, felt the need to insert herself into the conversation. "Monty Green is not a _man of mystery_. He's an engineer who likes peaceful resolutions and growing algae. He's the least mysterious person on this damn space station."

"Then how do you explain his Pike phase?" Harper asked with a frown.

"His mother." Raven answered shortly.

"So he's peace-loving apart from when someone he loves doesn't love peace?" Harper shot back, brow quirked.

"You see what I mean?" Echo found herself entering into the spirit of things. "He's a mystery."

"That doesn't make him _mysterious_." Raven insisted. "It makes him mildly complicated at best."

"I did not come here to listen to Harper swoon over Monty." Emori informed them. "I am pregnant, and you have to be kind to me. No more Monty chat."

"Well we're not talking about _Murphy_." Raven decided.

"And it seems wrong to gossip about Bellamy without Clarke here." Harper put in. "Maybe we should invite her via the radio next time."

"We could try not gossiping about men at all." Echo suggested mildly. "We could try not needing men in our lives all the damn time."

"Well of course we don't _need_ them." Raven was looking at her as if she'd lost her mind. "You managed to lead an army without one, I seem to remember, and me and Clarke brought down ALIE -"

"Modest." Emori coughed loudly into her hand.

"- but what else is there to gossip about around here?"

"We could talk about the baby." Harper said, eyes wide with excitement. "Have you chosen a name, yet?"

"Or we could talk about the wrestling tournament we're having next week." Echo suggested, somewhat nervous, not quite sure whether that was the kind of topic that was permissible at a _girls' night_.

"What's the point in talking about that?" Raven was determined to be her usual abrasive self, it seemed, and Echo felt her heart sink.

"You're right." She shook her head, pasted on a careful smile. "Sorry, that's probably not the point of girls' night."

"No, that's not what I meant." Raven rushed to assure her. "I just – what is there to talk about? Obviously you're going to win."

"You – you think so?" She supposed this was what people meant when they said they felt _moved_.

"Yeah."

"Thanks."

Raven was looking at her as if she had lost her mind. "There's no need to thank me. It's only the truth. If we were having an engineering tournament, I'd win."

"Why would we have an engineering tournament?" Harper asked, visibly puzzled.

"_How_ would we have an engineering tournament?" Emori followed up.

"That's not the point." Raven shook her head. "I'm just saying, there's no need to be shy in admitting you're good at things, Echo. We won't respect you any less for having a bit more confidence in yourself."

"Thanks." Echo stared at her hands for a while, and contemplated Raven's words. She was confident in the art of leading armies, sure, but substantially less confident in the art of living with other actual people. "I think I might be better at wrestling than at girls' nights."

"Not true." Emori jumped in. "You're great at girls' night. You got us away from that senseless conversation about Monty, didn't you?"

"That's true." Harper acknowledged. "But she did also _start_ it."

…...

Raven awoke early the following morning, and went to the Earth Monitoring Station. There was nothing unusual in that, in those two steady features of her morning routine. There was nothing unusual, either, in the fact that she sat down and started tinkering with the computer, checking up on a few simulations she had set to run overnight on the radiation readings.

The content of her thoughts, however, was a little less usual. She couldn't help but feel that she'd been a bit unnecessarily sharp the night before. Sure, a small dose of sharpness was a fairly standard feature of her personality. But she'd found her temper growing increasingly short, in recent weeks, and the faces of those in her company growing increasingly long, and she couldn't shake the idea that, perhaps, she was being somewhat more abrasive than strictly necessary.

She knew why that was, of course. She was worried sick about Emori. She'd never really had a best friend before, only Finn, who had been so many things to her that it was hard to keep track of them. But now that she had Emori in her life, she was getting increasingly anxious about this whole pregnancy thing. She was worried about her on a lot of levels, everything from whether mother and baby would come out of the birth alive and well, to whether the presence of a newborn might have a substantial impact on the dynamics of their friendship, and might mean rather fewer mornings spent achieving nothing in particular with a soldering iron.

After all, she was already lonelier in the mornings, since Emori had become more tired and started sleeping in. In months gone by, she would not have been tinkering with this computer _alone_. They'd have been laughing at each other's silly ideas for fixing that damn heating system on Deck A, perhaps, or having something of a race to see who could do some basic bit of circuitry the quickest.

She sighed, and gave a little shake. There was no sense in sitting here and worrying about all this. She did what she always did in moments like this, and called Clarke.

"This is The Ring, calling Eden, does anyone read me?"

"Raven? Is that you?" The voice which bounced straight back at her was Madi's.

"Hello, Madi. Is Clarke there?"

"I'll fetch Clarke now if you'll tell Bellamy he has to call me after breakfast so I can tell him about the bug I found?"

"It's a deal." Raven agreed with a laugh.

"Hello, Raven?" That was Clarke.

"Hey. How's the ground?"

"Damp." Clarke laughed. "It's raining pretty hard, today."

"I miss the rain. I think it's when it's pouring with rain that you know you're really on the ground."

"I'll try to remember that when I'm soaked to the skin, today."

"Yeah."

"What did you really want to talk about, Raven?" She inhaled sharply at the evidence of Clarke's perceptiveness.

"I'm worried about Emori."

"I can understand that, but there's nothing to be worried about. As far as we can tell, the pregnancy is progressing perfectly. She's due any day, and then, all being well, you'll have a healthy happy baby to make a fuss of."

"Yeah. I hope so. And I'm looking forward to having a kind of niece or nephew, of course, but – I guess it'll take over Emori's life a bit."

"A baby is a lot of work, there's no denying that. But I know everyone will help out, and Murphy's there, too. There's no reason why Emori shouldn't still be herself, and sit around by the radio fixing things with you."

"How did you know that was what I meant?"

"I know what it's like to worry about being left out in all this happiness."

"As if we could ever leave you out of this. You're Auntie Clarke."

"Thanks, Raven. It was good to talk to you."

"Right back at you."

…...

Bellamy had had enough. He decided that, rather abruptly, as he put down his spoon with a clang. It just wasn't _fair_, watching Murphy and Emori steal kisses whenever they thought no one was looking – or quite often when they knew full well someone was - and seeing Monty and Harper gaze at each other with what he could only describe as _bedroom eyes_. He missed Clarke, damn it, and he missed her in _that_ kind of way, and he very much intended to do something about it.

He couldn't do anything about her actual physical absence, of course. He wasn't quite capable of that. But he was feeling sufficiently desperate to try to do something about – well, about the whole _bedroom eyes_ genre of activity the two of them were missing out on. He never thought he'd see the day when he felt compelled to act on Murphy's _radio sex_ idea, but it seemed that there was no other choice.

Before he could waver in his resolve, he marched directly to Earth Monitoring.

"Clarke?" He picked up the radio and realised that he should, perhaps, have planned what he was going to say before doing so.

"Bellamy!" She sounded almost as happy to speak to him as he was to hear from her. "Hey. How are you?"

"I'm missing you." He announced, and before he knew it his words were running away with him. "And – and I'm missing you in _that_ way, if you know what I mean. And I was thinking – and this might sound stupid but stay with me – I was thinking we should try having radio sex."

"Bellamy -"

"No, I think it could work. We would just – _you know_ – and kind of talk to each other at the same time, I guess. I think maybe I should take the radio somewhere more private than here, though, because I don't really want Raven to walk in while I'm -"

"Bellamy, stop -"

"I don't mean right now, necessarily." He rushed to assure her, wondering why she didn't sound convinced. Was she not missing him quite in the way that he was missing her? "You could go away and think about it. We should – we should maybe plan what we want to do, because I guess it could be a bit awkward as we've not tried it before -"

"Bellamy -"

"Do you – do you not want to?" He hadn't considered that possibility, and found himself feeling a little hurt. "Sorry. Erm, maybe I've got the wrong idea. I just thought that – well, as relationships go, this probably counts as long distance. And I've heard it's a thing long distance couples used to do."

"Bellamy, let me speak." He couldn't tell whether she sounded more annoyed or amused. "It sounds like a great idea. But Madi's still up and she managed to walk past to get a cup of water at the exact moment you said the words _radio sex_."

"Oh."

"Oh." She echoed, laughing hard now. "No harm done, she didn't understand what you meant. But shall we continue that conversation a bit later?"

"That might be best." He conceded, pleased that she couldn't see the rather pained expression on his face. That was, he suspected, one of the more embarrassing moments of his week.

"But you'd better not think I'm letting you forget about it." She said, tone stern. "Because I'm definitely missing you in _that_ kind of way, too."

**a/n Thanks for reading!**


	18. Chapter 18

**a/n Thank you to the lovely readers who reviewed the last chapter! Shout out to DayDreamer-BleachLover for the question that kick-started some of the content of this chapter. Happy reading!**

Bellamy had indeed managed to restart that conversation a little later, once Madi was safely asleep, and had endured a slightly squirm-inducing discussion with Clarke about what, exactly, an intimate radio call might involve. And then he had taken himself off to bed – and if he was being honest, he had stayed awake thinking about exactly what they'd discussed for a little too long – and then, at last, he had fallen asleep and dreamed some pretty vivid dreams.

So it was that he found himself, this morning, in need of a rather particular favour from Raven.

"Hey." He made his way into Earth Monitoring, features arranged in a careful smile.

"Hey." If Raven thought it was odd that he had decided to show up here before breakfast, she did not choose to mention it. "How are you?"

"I'm great." He told her, a smidge too much honesty breaking through in his overenthusiastic tone. He was in danger of sounding like a lovestruck teenager in the midst of his first crush, at this rate.

Then again, maybe that wasn't so far off the mark.

"And how's Clarke?"

"She's great, too. That was... kind of what I wanted to ask you about, actually."

"Yeah?"

"Yeah. Is there some way that we could – make the radio portable? So that I could chat to Clarke from my bedroom or wherever?" It was rather lucky, he thought, that his skin tone was not exactly the blushing type.

"You want to be able to take the radio into your bedroom." Raven repeated straight back at him, brow quirked. "Any particular reason?"

"No." He squeaked a little. "No reason."

"Right. So I'm sure it's normal to be this uncomfortable about asking me whether you can take the radio you use to talk to your girlfriend into your bedroom _for no reason_."

He didn't have a good response to that. He just shrugged and hoped that his old friend would take pity on him.

She did, thank goodness. "I can probably make it work, set up an earpiece like you used in Mount Weather or something. Of course, any creep who wanted to listen in could still intercept the signal at the main box here, but I doubt even Murphy is sick enough to do that."

"I – you mean – erm -"

"Don't worry, Bellamy. We'll make you a door sign or something. Heaven knows you two idiots need all the help you can get."

He was about to defend himself – and Clarke, of course – most vigorously against that charge when he heard John Murphy scream. And that wasn't a sound he had ever expected to hear, really, but now that it reached his ears it all made perfect sense.

Emori must be in labour.

And it seemed that any more discussion of door signs and _no good reasons_ would have to wait for another day.

…...

Clarke was glad that Emori had decided to give birth in Earth Monitoring. Really she was, because otherwise there was no way she could have been there over the radio from the ground, and listening to her friend scream for several hours had to be a substantial improvement over not knowing what was going on at all.

All the same, it was not exactly pleasant, to be listening in on this and unable to do anything much to help. Monty was manning the radio, passing on Bellamy's occasional requests for advice and Murphy's constant requests for reassurance, passing back in the other direction Clarke's soothing recommendations to be patient and stay strong for Emori.

At least Madi was hardly complaining, enjoying a day without lessons and with endless time to play at bear trap to her heart's content.

Things were starting to pick up, now, on the other end of the line, with Monty reporting ever more frequent contractions, and then that they could see the baby's head, and then, at long last, that it was over.

Except it wasn't over for Clarke, not yet. Not until Harper's voice was there, too, confirming that the baby was breathing, and looked healthy as far as they could see, a lovely little girl.

Finally, she allowed herself to breathe a sigh of relief, and pass on her congratulations to the whole family.

"Thanks." Harper said, audibly excited. "They say to tell you that they're calling her Charlotte, as if anyone expected them to call her anything else. Do you want to speak to Bellamy? He's kind of gross at the moment, but I guess if you can't see that you might not mind."

Clarke let out a relieved laugh. "It's OK. Let him clean up. I'll speak to him later."

"If you're sure." Monty agreed, even as Clarke heard a very familiar voice _dis_agreeing in the background.

"Bellamy -" That sounded like Harper, trying to argue with him.

"I won't touch the damn radio, then." She could pick out Bellamy's actual words, now. "You press call and I'll just talk."

"I can hear you, you know." Clarke piped up, rolling her eyes at no one in fond exasperation at his apparent desperation to speak to her.

"Good." He said, and she could see in her mind's eye the stubborn set of his jaw. "I just needed to tell you I love you, and that I can't wait to deliver our kid one day. There, Harper, I'm done."

Clarke gave a giggle, shaking her head at his foolishness. "I love you, too. Go clean up. I'll be here when you're done."

She didn't know how long it might take him to see to the newborn and for the happy family to be comfortably relocated to their own room. She didn't know, either, whether there might be other priorities just now for her friends in the sky than talking to her. So it was that she decided to do something a little more useful than sitting about and waiting to hear his voice again.

She picked up a sketchbook and went to seek out Madi. And then the two of them made their way outside, and sat at the edge of the trees, and made a start on drawing the forest before them.

"Why do you always draw butterflies?" Madi asked, now.

"I don't _always_ draw butterflies." Clarke argued. "I draw people more than I draw butterflies."

"The things you draw most often are Bellamy, Lexa, me and butterflies." Madi insisted. "Why do butterflies make the list?"

She paused for a moment, wondered how to go about answering the question honestly but also usefully. "I loved the butterflies when I first came to Earth, but not as much as Octavia did. So I guess it helps me feel close to her, even though she's in the bunker. But it's more than that, too. It reminds me of being younger, I suppose, and being more innocent. You know I've told you stories about – some of the difficult things I've had to do. Killing people who wanted to hurt my friends. The butterflies remind me of a time before that."

"That's silly." Madi decided, with all the naivety of her years. "Just because you had to kill bad guys doesn't mean you're guilty. But the butterflies are really pretty."

Maybe a child could be capable of being wise as well as naive, she wondered.

They passed a little more time drawing together in a comfortable silence, Madi choosing to work on a portrait of Bellamy. Clarke thought that was a bit silly, really, given the view of trees and animals before them, and the fact that Madi had never even seen him in person. But she supposed that it was sweet, at least, that the little girl wanted to draw her long-awaited foster-father, and she had to admit that there were so many sketches of him littering their house that it couldn't be anything but reasonably accurate.

As the light began to fail, they made their way back inside. And there was no guarantee that Bellamy was ready to speak to them yet, of course, and he surely did have other priorities right now besides speaking to them, but all the same, she couldn't help but hope.

She was not disappointed, when she entered the living room to the sound of his familiar voice issuing from the radio.

"- suppose you must have gone out to catch dinner, or something. I hope you're both OK. I guess I'll speak to you later."

"Or you could speak to us now?" Clarke suggested, picking up the handset. "And not dinner, actually. Drawing."

"Hey. Good to hear from you." He said warmly, as if he didn't hear from them at least once a say, every day. "What were you drawing?"

Madi joined the party at that, wresting the radio from her mother's grasp. "I drew a picture of you, and Clarke says it looks really like you!"

"You – you did?" Bellamy appeared to think that was moving, rather than strange.

"Yeah. And she said she's going to stick it by her bed so she can see you smiling at her every morning."

"OK, Madi. That might be a little much." Clarke suggested, slightly embarrassed.

"What? He loves you." She said, with a seven-year-old shrug. "He's not going to think it's weird."

"She's right there." Bellamy agreed easily. "I think it's sweet."

"Sweet? You think I'm sweet?" She asked, a little incredulous.

"It's not the first word I'd pick, I guess." He admitted. "I might go for _awesome_, or something. But I do think having a picture of me by your bed might be sweet."

"I'm leaving." Madi declared, with an unexpectedly tactful sense of timing. "You guys are going to be boring grown-ups now, aren't you?"

That did seem to be the case, Clarke had to concede, as they both bade Madi goodnight and sent her skipping on her way.

"There's something I need to tell you." Bellamy muttered when she had left, and Clarke found herself somewhat daunted by the seriousness of his tone.

"What is it?" She asked, trying very hard not to panic.

"I don't think I look like your sketches any more." He began, sounding more than a little sad. "I didn't take care of myself very well when we first got here. I've only started training again since we got the radio working and -"

"Bellamy. Stop. I genuinely don't care." She heard him suck in a breath at that. "I don't mean that in a harsh way, I mean of course I care about you being worried. But I mean – I don't care what you look like. It's been years. Things change. And as long as you're still _you_, which I know you are because I talk to you every damn day, we're all good."

"You mean that?"

"Of course I mean that."

"Great." He still sounded tense, and she couldn't quite work out why.

"What's wrong?"

"I... I kind of have a beard. Half a beard. I don't know, it's stupid. I didn't shave much when I thought that you were – were gone. And then I guess I never really have since I got you back."

"You have a _beard_?" She could not quite believe that development. A little weight gain, or the occasional crease around his eyes, sure. But a _beard_? That was not something she had imagined.

"Half a beard." He corrected her, sounding absolutely mortified. "It's crap, really. Kind of wispy and pathetic and – and I'm going to shave it off as soon as we've finished this conversation."

"Don't bother." She recommended, trying to sound more caring than impatient. Clearly, for some reason, this conversation was important to him. "I'm not going to see you for years, and when I do I'll be more interested in kissing you than worrying about whether you've shaved."

"But – I just – you've been imagining me like I used to look, haven't you? And now, if we – if we go ahead with this radio sex idea – you'll be thinking of someone who doesn't even exist any more."

"Of course I've been imagining you like you used to look. I didn't know to do any different. But now I'm imagining you with a wispy and _crap_ half a beard. And guess what? I'm still in love with you. And I'll be thinking of you like that when we're having our... _intimate_ _radio chats_, and that will be _fine_." She concluded her rant, and took a deep breath. Listened carefully to the silence, at the other side of which he was, presumably, trying to collect his thoughts.

"It really doesn't bother you?"

"It really doesn't bother me. And I bet it looks a lot better than you think. You always seem surprised by your own good looks." She hesitated for a moment, but she knew that this was the moment to reveal a slight appearance change of her own, too. "There's something I need to tell you, too."

"There is?"

"Yeah. I cut my hair. As in, I _really_ cut my hair. It only reaches just past my ears. It just seemed more practical, while I'm stuck down here trying to keep myself and a kid alive and there's no one around to see it and tell me I look stupid."

"I don't think it'll look stupid." He told her slowly, evidently taking her concerns seriously. "I'm imagining it now. I think it probably looks really hot, actually. And, obviously, I'm still in love with you."

Well, then. It seemed they had both been worrying about nothing.

…...

John Murphy had spent years practising the art of unhappiness. He had rather thought that was his calling in life, until he met Emori, and decided that, perhaps, there were at least occasional moments of good to be grasped, too.

But now, it seemed, happiness seemed to have crept up on him. He could find no other explanation for the smile he could feel splitting his cheeks, nor for the warm bundle of _life_ he held cradled in his arms.

"Is she OK? Is she hungry?" Emori murmured, eyelids already drifting closed again with exhaustion. She should be asleep, he thought, should be getting her strength back, not fussing like this.

"She's fine." He reassured her, stroking Charlotte's perfect cheek with a gentle finger. "Go to sleep."

"I don't take orders from you, John."

"It's not an order." He soothed. "It's a request. I would like it if you would get some sleep, so that you can recover quickly and get back on with being your bad-ass self and bossing me around."

She laughed a little, snuggling into the pillow. "Wake me up if she's hungry."

"Yeah." He agreed, thinking it was probably the quickest way to end this conversation and get her to rest.

"And wake me up if she cries, or if you need help. Or if anything happens to -"

"Nothing's going to happen to her." He told her, a little fierce. "She's our daughter, Emori. You know I'd do anything to keep her safe."

"I know, John." She whispered, words beginning to lengthen with the drowsiness of oncoming sleep. "You're a good man."

He wasn't so sure about that. But he was working on it.

**a/n Thanks for reading!**


	19. Chapter 19

**a/n Thank you to those who reviewed that last chapter! Happy reading!**

Bellamy genuinely wanted to share with Clarke every ounce of happiness that Charlotte's arrival had brought to the Ring. He wanted her to know every time the little bundle of joy so much as soiled her nappy, every time she gurgled and smiled. That was, of course, the reason he was describing his latest attempt at babysitting in such minute detail.

He was absolutely not procrastinating at all. Any suggestion that, while he was sitting here in the privacy of his room, dressed in nothing but a pair of worn boxers as he talked to Clarke, he was trying to _put off_ the moment when they would make their first attempt at so-called radio sex was categorically untrue.

"So what did you do when she threw up on you?" Clarke asked, a laugh in her voice.

"I did what any self-respecting hero would do when his friend's kid's sick was dripping down their shirt. I swore loudly and changed my shirt."

"Wow. Really filling me with confidence about how you're going to raise our future kids, Bellamy."

"I'm joking. I swore pretty quietly, honestly. And I'm sure our future kids won't throw up on me."

"I think all kids throw up." She corrected him cheerfully. "I don't think you can claim ours would be any different."

"I can." He insisted. "Because our future kids will be _perfect_."

"That's sweet and all, but I'm telling you you're going to get sick over your shirt all the same."

He gave a grudging laugh and continued to recount his evening with Charlotte. "So then when I tried to put her to bed, she wouldn't settle down. And I started telling her some of those stories that O used to like and Madi likes, about the Greeks and Romans, but she wasn't having any of it. She cried and cried and cried. And in the end I got really desperate and started _singing_."

"And that worked?"

"Well it either sent her to sleep or it was so bad she pretended to be asleep to get me to shut up."

"I hope Murphy and Emori appreciated all this." Clarke was blatantly having a good giggle at his expense, but he found that he didn't really mind.

"Yeah, they did. Well, Emori did. She said thanks and that they'd had a nice date night. Murphy just started fussing about whether I'd fed Charlotte enough and whether she'd got enough sleep and whether she felt too warm."

"He's a sweet dad." she said thoughtfully. "But you'll be even better. You _are_ even better, already, with Madi."

"Can I get that in writing?"

"No. You're thousands of miles away, this radio call is going to have to do." He breathed a sigh of relief at the way she was able to talk about their separation so lightheartedly, the evidence of how much happier she'd grown in recent months. "So have you finished telling me every detail of your babysitting now?"

"I think so." He agreed, nodding firmly but then remembering she couldn't see it.

"Great. Now stop putting it off and get on with radio-screwing me."

He gaped in shock at that, and was suddenly very grateful that she couldn't see him. "What?"

"I can tell that's what you're doing. I didn't put on my one good bra for nothing, you know."

"Your – your one good bra?" His mouth felt suddenly rather dry.

"Yeah, you know, a bit of lacy fabric a woman might wear around her chest?"

He tried to remember how to breathe, but it was already getting quite challenging. He was never going to make it through this evening without completely humiliating himself.

"Bellamy?" Clarke sounded a little worried about him, now.

"Yeah?"

"You don't need to be nervous, you know that. I love you, no matter how awkward and funny this turns out to be." He frowned at that. He wasn't convinced he was _nervous_, as such, just feeling an uncomfortable blend of anticipation and a burning need to make this good for her. "But I reckon it'll be pretty damn hot, if we just give it a go."

"I'm not nervous, more excited." He told her, and it wasn't _quite_ a lie. "Let's do this. Where shall we start?"

…...

Clarke woke up the following morning with a broad smile already stretching its way across her face quite without her permission. It had, quite literally, been _years_ since she'd felt as good as she'd felt last night. Somehow her own left hand felt a hell of a lot better when she had Bellamy's warm voice in her ear, too.

She heard Madi stir in the next room, and forced herself to stop grinning like a love-struck teenager. She'd turned twenty not too long ago, and however love-struck she might have been, she was sensible and rational and other mature things, too. But, yeah, she was also something of a quivering pile of stupid, it turned out, when Bellamy got involved.

She jumped to her feet and pulled on some clothes, then made it out to the kitchen. Within minutes, something resembling breakfast was on the kitchen table and Madi was dancing down the corridor to eat it.

"Clarke!"

"Morning, Madi. How are you today?"

"I'm great. How was your date with Bellamy last night?"

"It was lovely, thank you." She tried to keep the blush off her cheeks as she answered.

"What did you do?" Madi asked, with all the naive curiosity one might expect from a young child. "Did he tell you stories? Did you talk about baby Charlotte?"

"Something like that." Clarke said, carefully vague, as she served herself some fruit.

"Are you going to have a baby, one day? So I can have a little brother or sister?"

Clarke choked slightly, but made it look like a rogue apple slice was the culprit rather than her daughter's ill-timed question. "We'd like to do that, one day, yes. Would you like to have another kid to play with?"

Madi thought about that question, long and hard. "Yeah. As long as you and Bellamy still play with me all the time. It would suck if the baby got to have all the fun."

"Trust me, Madi, we'd always make time for you."

When they had eaten their breakfast, Clarke sent Madi off to read. She was just about old enough, now, to spend an hour or so on her own with a book quite happily, and so they'd started including a bit of reading in her schedule of lessons. Clarke had a call planned with Raven, so things had all lined up quite smoothly.

She sat down at the radio, and picked up the handset.

"Raven? It's Clarke here."

Within moments the response came through. "Clarke, hey. How are you doing?"

"I'm good."

"I'd say that's an understatement." Raven sounded amused, and Clarke couldn't quite work out why.

"What do you mean?"

"I think you must be better than _good_. Bellamy wouldn't stop grinning all through breakfast."

"I don't know what you're trying to imply." Clarke said smartly, even thought she knew full well what Raven was trying to imply.

"Yes you do. Come on, you know I'm smart enough to figure it out. Bellamy wants to be able to use the radio privately in his bedroom, he takes it in there last night, he looks smug as anything this morning. I'm not an idiot, Clarke."

"You must have called me about something more interesting than my sex life."

"I disagree. The saga of your relationship is literally the most exciting thing happening in this damn tin can. Except Emori's baby, I guess."

"Wow. I'll tell her you said that."

"Whatever. The point is, teasing you guys is my greatest source of joy."

"No." Clarke reprimanded her firmly. "Your greatest source of joy is _definitely_ supposed to be the baby."

"You know, I did actually want to call about something else." She felt a surging sense of victory at this evidence that Raven was admitting defeat.

"Yeah?"

"Yeah. So as far as I can see from my readings up here, the radiation levels are dying down quicker than we expected."

Clarke was silent for a moment, utterly shocked, trying to process this serious item of news that Raven had delivered quite so casually.

"Clarke?"

"You – say that again?"

"I've been measuring the radiation levels in the Earth's atmosphere." Raven explained with infinite care. "They're dying down a lot quicker than we expected."

"You mean – you mean that it might be safe for you guys to come down sooner than you planned?" She tried not to let her excitement run away with her.

"Well that's why I needed to speak to you. It's difficult for me to learn much about what it's actually like on the ground. It certainly won't be safe for us for a good couple of years, but it might not be as long as the three more years we were planning for. Nearer the time I'll ask you to go look for some equipment in Becca's lab so you can confirm what it's like down there."

Clarke was still struggling a bit to arrange her thoughts. "_Less_ than three years?"

"Most likely, yes. But not immediately, still a couple of years or so."

"_Less_ than three years?" She repeated, just to be sure.

"Yeah. We'll be there before you know it."

…...

Raven had wanted to tell Clarke about her hunch first, and now that she had done so she felt that it was only fair to share the news with her crew mates over the lunch table.

"Guys, I have news." As was usually the case in such circumstances, her announcement was largely ignored.

"I think Bellamy has _news_ too, but he doesn't seem to want to share it with us." Murphy cocked an eyebrow, but it lapsed into an apologetic smile as Emori shot him a look.

"I have a better idea." Harper piped up. "Instead of teasing Bellamy, why don't we plan a nice evening together? A movie night or something? It's been too long."

"I'm game." Echo agreed. "One of those movies with all of the stabbing?"

"Why did you introduce her to horror?" Emori gave a sigh of mock-despair. "We'll never watch anything else again."

"I'd rather not choose horror, Echo." Harper suggested in a soothing tone. "Maybe we could split the difference, and go for some nice clean adventure?"

"_Clean_ adventure is unrealistic." Murphy said, rolling his eyes.

"Well we're not watching romance." Echo shivered at the very thought of it.

"I don't see why not." Monty was, as ever, in touch with his sensitive side. "A good romance movie can be very rewarding. And Bellamy's apparently in a romantic mood."

There was a stunned silence at that. Sure, Monty was not averse to a bit of friendly teasing, but he rarely teased _Bellamy_. There was something of an unwritten rule on the Ring that Bellamy and Clarke deserved to be wrapped up in a little metaphorical cotton wool, after all the stresses and strains their relationship had overcome.

Raven, of course, was not interested in metaphorical cotton wool. She was interested in sharing her news. She therefore took advantage of the silence to stand up and yell her news so loudly no one could ignore her.

"It won't be three years."

She got a few funny looks for that.

"What won't be three years? The movie night?" Echo seemed to think they were still talking about entertainment.

"What's _it_?" Murphy frowned at her, confused.

Bellamy, however, had obviously caught on right away, but somehow looked about ready to cry. "It won't? It – it'll be _more_?"

"No, you idiot." Raven chided him affectionately. "It'll be less. We're going to the ground sooner than we thought."

Another stunned silence. And then Emori, of course, spoke up.

"I wondered whether you'd noticed that, Raven. I was beginning to think I was imagining it. But if the readings on the ground are directly proportional to what we're getting from up here, my bet is one year and eleven months."

Yet more silence, and expressions ranging from joy to disbelief to sheer incomprehension greeted her words.

And then, of course, Bellamy leapt to his feet. "Start on lunch. Don't wait for me. I have to go tell Clarke."

**a/n Thanks for reading!**


	20. Chapter 20

**a/n I know, I know, I don't update this story very often. In my defence, I've written better things. But a lovely guest reviewer reminded me that some people like reading this so here goes. Happy reading!**

John Murphy still couldn't believe his luck. He'd had six months to adjust to the idea of being a father, now. Six months of being amazed by little Charlotte's smile, and being amazed most of all by the fact that Emori actually wanted a family life with him. Six months, and he still couldn't believe it was real.

Something odd had been occurring, on and off, during those six months. Often Emori slept in later than him – even though she'd always been the early riser of the pair of them – and today was one of those days. John knew she'd been up half the night with Charlotte, and the guilt that he felt at that was something he hadn't got used to, either. He knew it made sense for her to be the one awake and nursing the baby at all hours of the night – after all, she was the one who was actually lactating – but he still thought he ought to find a way to make it up to her.

He was perfectly happy to admit it – fatherhood had turned him soft.

"John?" She murmured sleepily as he left the bed.

"Sleep." He urged her, reaching across to press a kiss to her hairline. "I'll bring you some breakfast."

That shocked her into wakefulness, and the next thing he knew, she was wide-eyed and staring at him. "Who are you and what have you done with John Murphy?"

"I'm trying to be a good boyfriend. You were up all night and you should get some more sleep." He grumbled, insecure and uncomfortable. He liked to think he'd always gone out of his way to take care of her physical well-being, even if he hadn't always been the most romantic of partners. So he was a little hurt, he decided, that she seemed surprised by the idea that he might want her well-rested and well-fed.

"Thanks." She said, with a smile more sweet than any former career thief should have any right to wear.

Murphy threw on some clothes, kissed Charlotte good morning, and headed out, easing the door shut as quietly as possible behind him. All that time he spent practising being a sneak was serving him well, now, when it came to ensuring his two best girls were not disturbed.

Bellamy was the only person in the dining room when he arrived. His friend's nose was buried in a book and he was wearing that careless smile that seemed to have been permanently etched on his face since they made contact with Clarke and Madi almost a year ago.

"Morning." Murphy offered, a little louder than necessary, because he was still something of an ass at heart and didn't get much chance to practise his piss-taking skills on his girlfriend, these days.

Bellamy jumped, then tried to pass it off as a stretch, then gave up and laughed. "You're a creep, you know that, Murphy?"

He gave a sarcastic bow and then took a chair. "It's what I do."

Bellamy was looking at him with an expression he couldn't make sense of. "I'm not sure about that, you know. Your girlfriend accused you of being _sweet_ the other day."

"Yeah, that was a mistake." He picked up a coaster for something to do, turned it over in his hands. "I don't know what I did to deserve her, you know? And Charlotte as well. I never expected to get this lucky."

"I know the feeling. I don't know what I did to deserve Clarke and Madi."

That, Murphy decided, was an idiotic statement. "Are you out of your mind? You've been showing that woman you deserve her for _years_. How many times have you saved her life? Or made her smile when the world turned to shit? And both her and Madi know you'd do anything for them."

Bellamy looked annoyed now. "Are you for real, Murphy? You've just described exactly what you do for Emori. I've heard the stories of the time you got locked up in Becca's lab and tried to protect her. And even before that, at Polis when ALIE was in her head and you still wouldn't hurt her."

"You know, sometimes I think this is all some big conspiracy – having a girlfriend and a baby and this damn _space family_. You're all just trying to get me to become some signed-up member of the good guys' club."

"Is it working?" Bellamy asked, smirking that infuriating smirk.

It was working. It was working only too well, but Murphy had no interest in admitting that. He simply played with his coaster, and looked forward to breakfast, and waited for Bellamy to wipe that smug look off his face.

…...

Clarke was excited about girls' night. She made a point, these days, of radioing each of her friends rather than only Bellamy, but there was something very different and rather special about the idea of having all of them brought together around the radio at once. Apart from anything else, she still spent more time talking to Raven and Harper than to Echo or Emori, and she figured it couldn't be a bad idea to get to know them better.

So Clarke was excited – but Madi was positively bouncing off the walls. She'd never been invited to a girls' night before, but she'd been asking Clarke what one was, and so Raven had seen fit to extend the invitation to the eight-year-old as well. Clarke had to admit that she wasn't sure it was the most sensible idea Raven had ever had. Conversation at Spacekru girls' nights tended to consist of an odd combination of comparing movies, innuendos about their sex lives, and reminiscing about violent dangers of days gone by. On top of all that, the women on the Ring tended to get through quite a lot of moonshine. But Madi was desperate to be included, and Raven had promised they'd keep it clean, and so it was that Clarke found herself sitting at the radio with her daughter and waiting for the evening to get underway.

"This is Clarke and Madi, calling the Ring, anyone there?"

"Hey. We're all here." Raven greeted her, and sure enough, Clarke could already hear muffled laughter in the background.

"Thanks for inviting me. I can't wait." Madi piped up.

"You're welcome, Madi." Harper said warmly. "How are you?"

"I'm great. I'm excited!" The girl was fidgeting in her chair. "What do we talk about?"

There was a heavy silence, and Clarke found herself regretting that they hadn't actually sat down and planned suitable topics of conversation. She'd even suggested that, but Raven had laughed and said something about how ridiculous it was to try to _plan fun_.

"Sometimes we talk about movies." Harper offered cautiously. "Have you watched any movies?"

"No. But Clarke's told me about some. And Bellamy even does scenes from movies for my bedtime stories sometimes. He does different voices and everything." Madi enthused.

"Of course he does." Raven said through a snort. "Tell us, Madi – what's Bellamy's best movie scene?"

"He's good at Shrek." Madi informed them eagerly, while Clarke sat back and watched her chatter happily away. "He's really good at making the ogre sound scary. And he says Shrek is an important movie to learn about because it's all about fairy tales."

"His educational priorities are interesting." Raven laughed, not unkindly.

"Remind me not to let him teach Charlotte." Emori agreed.

"I'm going to teach baby Charlotte all of Bellamy's stories when she's older." Madi informed them firmly. "Stories are important."

This whole conversation was making Clarke very proud and a little emotional, she had to admit. "We should ask our friends about their days." She prompted Madi gently.

"Yes! Yes we should. How were your days?"

"We had a good training session." Harper offered.

"What did you do?" Madi asked, all curiosity.

"We learnt some wrestling moves from Echo." Harper explained. "It was pretty fun watching Murphy and Bellamy get beaten. Don't tell them I said that. But it was cool to see Echo pull some moves where skill mattered more than strength."

"That does sound cool." Madi agreed. "Can you teach me when I'm older, Echo?"

There was a heartbeat's silence. Echo and Clarke were still far from close, and Echo had never really struck her as the _teaching_ type.

"If that's OK with your parents." Echo answered, with every appearance of calm. "Wrestling isn't really my best skill though. I'd be better at teaching you archery."

"It's OK with me." Clarke joined in eagerly, keen to encourage this overture of friendship. "Thanks for offering, Echo."

"Any time. What else are aunts for?"

This might not have been the family Clarke ever expected, or even asked for. But she realised, now, that it was quite the best family she could ever have.

…...

Bellamy was proud of his self control. He'd made it all the way to their usual evening appointment without giving in and calling Clarke. But he was only human, so he did start jogging to the radio the moment he'd finished the last of his supper.

"This is Bellamy, calling Clarkadia."

He heard laughter as someone picked up the radio at the other end. "You must be in a good mood if you're calling this _Clarkadia_ again." Clarke observed. "How many times is it now that I've told you it's a stupid name?"

"Thirty-seven."

"You made that up."

"Yep." He grinned and added another one to his mental tally of kisses he owed her when he reached the ground. That was something he'd started doing a couple of months ago – every time he wanted to kiss her, he'd add another one to the list. He was already well into the thousands, but he figured they'd have a whole lifetime for him to find the chance to make good on his debt.

"What's got you so excited, then?" Clarke asked. "Is it something Madi will want to hear about? She's playing outside at the moment, but I can fetch her."

"I don't think she'd be excited." He conceded. "But I'm excited."

"I think we covered that. Are you going to tell me what this is all about?"

He paused a moment for dramatic effect. "Lettuce."

"What?" Clarke sounded confused, and he added yet another to his kissing tally. She didn't often sound confused, and he could just imagine the way she'd be scrunching her nose up to match and -

No. That wasn't the point of this conversation.

"Lettuce." He confirmed. "We had lettuce at dinner."

"Oh my god." He could here Clarke growing excited, now, as she realised what that meant. "Lettuce isn't algae."

"I know. Monty's been experimenting with using the wastewater from the algae as fertiliser for other crops. He said he started with lettuce because it's so easy, and because there was lots of lettuce seed left behind up here. But yeah – it works. He's been working on it a few weeks but he kept it a secret till just now when he surprised us with lettuce." He made it to the end of his enthusiastic ramble, and waited with baited breath for Clarke's response.

"You know what this means?" She asked, and he felt his heart swell with affection. Typical Clarke – already she was moving on from excitement over a bit of lettuce and thinking of the bigger picture.

"Fertiliser." He confirmed, grinning broadly.

"We might be able to convert some of the desert back into usable farmland. We could turn the Earth green again."

"All with Green's green goop." He added, wondering if anyone in the history of humanity had ever been quite so happy about lettuce before.

"That's such good news. Thanks for telling me, Bellamy."

"Was it a decent anniversary gift?" He asked, trying to keep his tone light. The question was almost a serious one – it wasn't like he could give her much while there were so many miles in between them.

"It's not our anniversary." She reminded him.

"It's nearly our anniversary. Tomorrow's a year since Raven fixed the radio. And I know we're having a big party then with everyone crowding in here and drinking but – I thought telling you that news might be a way for us to celebrate together tonight." He cleared his throat noisily. "Just the two of us."

"You're right. It was a lovely gift. Thank you. We can find a way to celebrate _just the two of us_ when Madi's gone to bed, if you want to take your portable radio back to your room tonight?" She suggested coyly.

"I'd like that a lot. D'you want to go fetch her so I can tell her a bedtime story?"

"I will do in a minute. Just as soon as you tell me why you've decided that tomorrow is our anniversary. Because now I think about it, I'm pretty sure no one said anything about a relationship that first day." Clarke's voice was teasing, and somehow it made him miss her all the more.

"Is there another day you'd like me to use instead?"

"No." She conceded, and he could hear that she was on the verge of laughter.

"Great. In that case – happy anniversary, Princess."

**a/n Thanks for reading!**


	21. Chapter 21

**a/n Here I am with a chapter full of fluff and a repetition of my usual message about how I'm not abandoning this story - I'm just taking a while between updates. I've written a few (... several) other stories in the meantime and some of them even involve radios during the S4 time jump if you're short of things to read. Happy reading!**

Bellamy was enjoying the party. Really, he was. Company and music and moonshine were all good things, and even better when they were part of a celebration to mark one year since getting through to Clarke on the radio.

But he couldn't help but look forward to the moment when all their friends would go to bed and leave him to have some private time with Clarke.

In the meantime, though, he resolved to do his best to enjoy the festivities. He bounced Charlotte in his arms for a few minutes so that Emori and Murphy could dance. He briefly joined in a conversation Monty and Harper were having with Clarke about fertiliser and how they might get agriculture going again, when they returned to the ground. He even found himself at one point settling a good-humoured dispute between Echo and Raven, who had found themselves disagreeing over the rules of the drinking game they were playing.

And then, at last, his extended family started to head home.

He tried not to look too eager to get to the radio. He'd had a year to practise that, now, so he was almost an expert in the art of pretending that he wasn't jogging towards the sound of Clarke's voice. In his defence, he figured anyone else would behave just the same, in his situation. He certainly couldn't imagine Monty and Harper or Murphy and Emori taking this kind of separation well.

"Bellamy? Are you there?" Madi's voice asked, just as he was taking his seat.

"Yeah. I'm here. Shouldn't you be heading to bed, kid?"

"Clarke says I can stay up a couple of minutes to say goodnight to you." Madi explained, and he could practically hear the pout in her voice.

"I did say that." Clarke agreed cheerfully.

Bellamy found himself smiling. That seemed to happen a lot, recently. "In that case it sounds like you have a couple of minutes to tell me everything about your day, Madi."

Madi set off at a rush. "We had stewed apples for breakfast and then we went out hunting because Clarke wants us to dry more meat for winter and then I had a writing lesson and I wrote about the story of Achilles."

"Achilles, huh?"

"Yeah. Clarke said I could write whatever story I wanted and that's one of my favourite of your stories."

"It's a good story. Used to be one of your Aunt Octavia's favourites, too. So you've had a good day?"

"A really good day. The party was great."

"Glad to hear you enjoyed yourself." He wasn't altogether sure what a young child could possibly get out of radioing a bunch of adults she'd never met who were drinking a little more moonshine than strictly sensible, but he supposed Madi didn't exactly have a lot of other company or entertainment in her life.

"Clarke says it's bedtime now. Night, Bellamy."

"Night, Madi."

There was a few seconds pause, as there always was at this point in their bedtime routine. Then Clarke's voice came over the radio.

"So – did you enjoy the party?" She asked brightly.

"Yeah. Sure. It was great." He swallowed. "I guess I missed you though. Does that sound crazy? You were right there all along but it was different from our usual date night."

"I get that. I kind of agree with you there. But we can make up for it now." She suggested, tone teasing.

"You're insatiable." He told her. It wasn't a complaint.

"I know." She agreed, unabashed. "Come on. Ask me your stupid question for the day and then we can get on with taking this to the bedroom."

"It's your turn for a stupid question. I asked two last time."

"OK." She agreed.

And then there was a pause. A good three seconds, in which she could have asked her stupid question, but didn't.

Bellamy couldn't help but wonder why that might be.

"Clarke? You there?"

"Oh. Yeah. You know how there are no stupid questions between us...?" She reminded him, sounding almost tentative.

"Yeah. That's the truth, Clarke. Whatever you're agonising over, just ask it."

He wasn't sure what he was expecting, after that hesitation. Probably something deep and traumatic about his support for Pike or about leaving Clarke behind to die.

Whatever he was expecting, it wasn't this.

"Is it true you slept with Raven?" Clarke asked, sounding rather flustered, he thought. He wasn't sure whether it was a blessing or a curse that he seemed to have a unique gift for making this usually calm and controlled woman lose her cool.

"Yes." He answered, truthfully but hesitantly. "Why do you ask?"

"She told me the other day. I guess I didn't think she would lie about it but I wanted to hear it from you." She said, in a carefully level tone he couldn't quite read. He would give anything, right now, to be able to see her face – and not just for a clue as to what she might be thinking.

"I'm sorry I didn't tell you sooner. I guess it never came up. But it was a long time ago." He hedged, wondering where this was going. Clarke had always known he had slept with other people, so why was she asking about this now? Was it because it was Raven in particular, her close friend?

"No, it's fine. It's not that at all. Really, I'm not annoyed or whatever. We've both slept with other people and that's how it is." She rushed to assure him. "It's just – it's frustrating. And kind of sad, don't you think? It feels like we've both slept with everyone in the world except each other."

"We'll have the rest of our lives to make up for that when we get back to Earth." He told her with conviction.

"Yeah. I'm looking forward to it."

"And there are other things we can do until then to take the edge off it." He reminded her, with all the subtlety of – well, of a guy very much in love.

She laughed, bright and true. "Now who's insatiable? Go on, take that radio to your bedroom."

Now that was a demand he wasn't going to leave her to make twice.

…...

Raven didn't like to take all the credit for the joy that had come into their lives since learning Clarke was alive. Baby Charlotte wasn't anything to do with her, after all.

But she was Raven Reyes, so she did like to take _most_ of the credit. She was the one who fixed the radio and got through to Clarke, and she wasn't above reminding her friends of that every so often, when it served her purpose. Tonight, for example, she wanted a girls' night, and she was perfectly prepared to tell everyone it was to be a celebration of her getting through to Clarke if she had to.

There was nothing wrong with having two parties for the same event, right?

Anyway, as it turned out, she didn't have to employ such devious tactics at all. Echo was always keen to have company, since she decided to practise the art of having friends. Harper was a sociable sort, Clarke was lonely for obvious reasons, and Emori was more than happy to give Murphy a turn taking care of Charlotte for the evening.

"I love her, of course." She rushed to assure them, as if worrying that she might have sounded somehow _unmaternal_ in her exhaustion. "But I could use a break."

"You're doing great, Emori, and you should definitely take a break." Harper reassured her, with a quick friendly hug.

So it was that, later that evening, they found themselves crowded around the radio and chatting about everything and nothing.

Raven was there to have fun, first and foremost. But she thought there was a little business to get out of the way before they got started on socialising in earnest.

"Clarke. I meant to ask – how's it going with clearing the rubble?"

"Pretty good. You were right – blowing it up a little bit at a time does work. But we haven't been to Polis for a couple of weeks now. Too busy stocking the larder for winter."

"Yeah. That makes sense. There's no rush." Raven assured her. "It looks like it'll be about another eighteen months until it's safe for them to open the door."

"How's the fuel situation going?" Clarke asked.

"We're nearly done." Emori jumped in to answer that question. "The rocket's ready to take the biofuel, we're just waiting on Monty for the last few batches of algae."

"That's great news."

"You'll be the first to know when we're finished."

Clarke laughed. "I should hope so. I can't see who else you're going to tell. Are you radioing other people behind my back?"

That had them all laughing, and had Echo and Harper leaning closer to the radio. Raven wondered if that was Clarke's intention – for a leader and reluctant mass-murderer, Clarke was also damn good with people. Raven wouldn't put it past her to have deliberately made that comment to open the conversation up and move them away from engineering.

Raven decided to rise to that implicit challenge.

"Tell us more about how things are going on the ground, Clarke. Are you ready for winter?"

"Is anyone ever really ready for winter?" She replied with spirit.

"In Azgeda we were always ready for winter." Echo offered. "I think that was the only good thing about Nia's reign."

There was an awkward silence – of course there was. Raven for one had no idea how to follow up a comment of that emotional impact from a woman she had only recently started to consider a friend.

"I'm sorry." Echo rushed to apologise. "I didn't mean – I shouldn't have."

It was Harper who jumped in, then. "Don't you apologise. You're always welcome to talk about your past with us. I guess we just need to practise saying the right thing back to you, it looks like." She frowned. "I'm sorry that Nia was that bad."

"Yeah." Raven found her voice. "Sorry, Echo."

Clarke piped up over the radio. "I only met her once, but that was enough to tell she was a manipulative monster."

Of all things, Echo laughed at that, a cold and slightly hysterical sound. "You got that right, Clarke. Come on, let's leave that behind. Tell us more about your winter preparations."

"We've got plenty of meat. Venison, mostly."

"I'm jealous." Emori spoke up. "Sounds better than algae."

"Anything's better than algae." Raven groaned.

"Being ready for winter isn't just about meat." Echo offered, quiet but firm.

"No, you're right. We've got some carrots and potatoes in the root cellar, and I've dried all the medicinal herbs I could think of. We've got plenty of firewood. I've checked the roof for holes. Pretty much the only thing that's left is to make Madi some new winter clothes. She grows too fast, that kid."

"Just wait until you have a baby. They grow so quickly." Emori said, more than a little wistful, Raven thought.

"You can always have another one if you miss her being all small and pathetic and sicking up." Raven offered. Charlotte was quite a robust infant, these days, and already appeared to be well on the way to becoming a toddler.

Emori laughed. "No, I think we're good with one for now. Maybe when we get back to the ground."

"We've been talking about that, too." Harper volunteered.

Echo sighed a sarcastically loud sigh. "Great. Everyone's having babies when we land."

"Hey. I said nothing." Clarke argued, voice warm with laughter.

"No. I know _you_ didn't say anything." Echo agreed. "But it's all Bellamy will talk about since Murphy and Emori had theirs."

Raven had never known Clarke to be lost for words, but it seemed that it had happened now. She briefly considered the idea that perhaps the radio had cut out, but then she managed to make out what sounded like loud giggles.

"What's that, Clarke?" She asked.

"That's Madi." Clarke said, somewhere between affectionate and exasperated. "She's spent too much time on the radio to you guys and Bellamy. She's learnt how to tease."

"I'm sorry." Raven said, completely unapologetic.

"No you're not." Clarke argued. "You're glad I'm laughing more."

"We're all glad you're laughing more." Harper corrected her.

Yes. Raven could certainly agree with that.

…...

There was a reason Clarke had left making Madi's new winter clothes until last. Tailoring wasn't exactly her greatest talent.

Who was she kidding? She was completely incompetent at it.

That rankled. Clarke wasn't used to being completely incompetent at anything. She'd taken down ALIE and held the human race together in the face of the end of the world, so she damn well thought she ought to be able to handle a needle. And it wasn't as if she was lacking in artistic or creative talents – she'd been drawing since she was old enough to hold a stick of charcoal.

The fact of the matter was, that she hadn't quite got the hang of the structural side of sewing. Whenever she tried to make a garment, the fit was all wrong, too tight across the shoulders, too loose around the waist. There was a reason that she and Madi had spent last winter in shapeless fur capes.

She had a bit of a plan, this year. She was going for capes again – they were warm, and Madi didn't outgrow them so quickly since they didn't really have a fit in the first place. She'd scavenged some leggings from a chest in one of the houses in the village that she thought would probably fit Madi well enough. The only thing left to worry about was shirts, or tops, or vests of some kind. Clarke had a heap of furs, a needle and thread, and a grudgingly positive attitude.

OK, _determined _might have been more accurate than strictly positive.

At this point, of course, Madi wandered into the living room to start asking questions.

"What are you making, Clarke?" An excellent question.

"I thought you had some reading to do?" Clarke decided that offence was the best form of defence.

"I've done my reading. I want to help."

Clarke had the utmost faith in her daughter's many talents, but she wasn't about to let an eight year old loose with a needle or a pair of sharp sheers. She hesitated for a moment, wondering how to make the girl feel useful.

"Is there anything you particularly want for winter clothes, Madi? I've got you some leggings and a cape. I'm just making you some tops now."

Madi's eyes lit up. "Can I have a tunic?"

"A tunic?" That sounded like a promising idea. Tunics didn't need to be closely fitted, right?

"A tunic." Madi repeated. "I always wanted a tunic. We had an ambassador from Azgeda come to the village once and she had this long fur tunic that came half way to her knees and it looked super cool. And I asked my _nomon_ for one but she said that it took too much fur to make them that long. And that they were more for big girls." Madi recalled, frowning at the memory.

Clarke knew she had to tread carefully, here. She didn't want to be seen to be usurping or criticising Madi's birth mother. But the fact of the matter was that they had plenty of furs and tunics sounded like something she could actually sew.

"I think your _nomon_ was right, Madi. They do take a lot of fur. But we have plenty now, so let's make you a long fur tunic for this winter."

Madi grinned, excited. "Can I help?"

"You can sit and keep me company while I work." Clarke tried a bit of lighthearted honesty. "Sewing isn't my favourite thing, so I'd love to have you here to chat with."

"Octavia and Bellamy are better at sewing." Madi provided, because of course she had heard the stories.

"Yeah, that's true. Can you remember the story I told you about how they learnt to sew?"

"Their mum did sewing for her job." Madi declared with an air of victory.

"Well remembered, Madi. Maybe you can tell Bellamy all about me trying to sew when we call him later."

Madi made an agreeing noise. "Do you think they'll teach me how to sew when it's safe for them to come back?"

Clarke considered the question for a moment. Based on what she'd seen of Earth so far, she very much suspected that there would be other priorities besides sewing. She'd expect an emphasis on hunting and growing food at the very least, and quite possibly another war, knowing their luck.

But maybe it didn't have to be that way. Maybe they could build a lasting peace, and perhaps teaching the next generation some treasured family skills could become a priority alongside the daily struggle to survive.

"I'm sure they'd love to if they get the chance." Clarke said, in the end, balancing optimism with honesty.

Apparently well satisfied with that answer, Madi smiled happily and set to the important task of watching her mother work with rapt fascination.

**a/n Thanks for reading!**


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